Mickey agreed to put the mule down, but as he walked out the door, it occurred to him that the situation might present yet another opportunity to pull a prank on his good friend. Suppressing a grin, Mickey stormed from the rancher’s house. As he approached his truck he said, “That no-good bastard won’t let us hunt on his land. We drove all the way down here for nothing.”
Mickey reached for his shotgun in the back of the pickup and started marching toward the rancher’s barn. As Mickey told the rest of the story:
I said, “Come on, I’ll show him.”
Billy grabbed his gun and ran after me. “What are you gonna do, Mick?”
When I got to the barn, I said, “That bastard.” Then I aimed my shotgun at the blind mule and pulled the trigger—bam!
And then, right behind me, I heard two more shots—bam, bam! I turned around and Billy has shot two of the rancher’s cows. He says, “That bastard, should we shoot more?”
For all the hunting and carousing Mickey and Billy were doing, Billy later wrote that he also soaked up the benefits of the quiet, rustic culture. Merlyn Mantle cooked for him—he developed an appetite for quail—and Billy gained about twenty pounds during his Oklahoma vacation. The lifelong city slicker said he felt at peace in the country environment.
On January 15, 1954, the day after Joe DiMaggio married Marilyn Monroe at San Francisco City Hall, Billy’s hardship deferral was withdrawn by the Selective Service Board No. 47 in Berkeley. Billy was reclassified 1-A, which meant the army could draft him at any time, and if that happened, he would be obligated to report for duty in about two weeks. Billy had already served nearly six months in 1950, but the requirement was two years of service.
Billy’s induction notice arrived at the Yankees’ spring training complex in early March. Stengel was crestfallen.
“Miss him?” Stengel said, responding to a question. “Certainly I’m going to miss him. Why, the kid’s been terrific. Sure, he told off the owners. He also let George Weiss have it, and he had me seeing red. But he made us like it because he proved he could do everything we thought he couldn’t do on that ball field. They haven’t recovered yet from what he did to them in Brooklyn last October. I think he would have had his greatest year this season.”
Billy left spring training telling reporters, “The Yanks will do all right. Please say so long to the Dodgers for me. They’re on their own now.”
It wasn’t the best time to be entering the military if you were a professional athlete. Congress had launched an investigation into whether athletes were receiving preferential treatment and cushy assignments that amounted to nothing more than playing on a stateside army baseball, basketball, or football team.
Billy arrived at California’s Fort Ord in his Cadillac, which irked his superiors. The base’s chief officer, General Robert McClure, promptly announced that Billy would not be allowed to play for the Fort Ord baseball team.
“Martin’s too hot,” McClure declared. “You might say he’s radioactive.”
Billy was making $215 a month. Per a court order issued as part of his still-unresolved divorce proceedings, he had to pay $150 a month in matrimonial and child support to Lois and Kelly Ann. Billy was at Fort Ord less than a month before he was sent to Fort Carson just south of Colorado Springs, Colorado. He was part of the Fourth Infantry Division. At first, Billy was mostly ordered to do kitchen duty, which he said he did not mind because the cooks were Italians with whom he connected—and they gave him extra food when he left duty each day.
Eventually, he was assigned to a patrol unit, which required long treks up Colorado’s mountains. The cooks snuck beers into his knapsack for the road.
By the spring, the Fort Carson commander had another assignment for Billy—player/coach of the camp baseball team. So much for worrying about cozy assignments.
“I had never really thought about managing,” Billy told the New York Post’s Maury Allen in the late 1970s. “I was still young in 1954. I knew I would play again after I got out and I didn’t really consider anything past playing. I found that I enjoyed it. It was something that opened my eyes.”
Billy was the ultimate players’ manager, loaning his Cadillac to anyone who wanted it for a date or to drive into town. The Fort Carson squad had a 25–4 record and won the league championship with Billy mostly playing center field and pitching.
The camp commander did something afterward that few of Billy’s future superiors would do—he awarded his manager a good conduct medal. Billy was also promoted to corporal.
It was a strangely quiet year in the young life of Billy Martin. Sequestered in central Colorado, he was removed from fundamental cultural developments. The world was vaulting out of the World War II era in multiple ways. The French incursion into Vietnam ended in defeat and withdrawal, the first domino in a succession of events whose consequences would reach into the 1970s. Roger Bannister broke the four-minute barrier in the mile. Boeing introduced the 707 jetliner. Elvis Presley made his debut on The Ed Sullivan Show.
But the news that Billy followed most closely came in daily updates from the American League pennant race where the Cleveland Indians were running away with the title. For the rest of his life, Stengel would note that the only year the Yankees did not win the pennant in the early to mid-1950s was when Billy was not on the team. There was no hiding the Yankees’ deficiencies in the middle of the infield where Billy’s replacement, Jerry Coleman, batted just .217 and Rizzuto .195. Berra and Mantle had strong years at the plate, but to most observers, the Yankees looked out of sync. Stengel would always insist it was because he had lost his field general.
The New York Giants swept the Indians in the World Series, which history has remembered primarily for Willie Mays’s over-the-shoulder catch in Game 1. Billy was hiking up another mountain that day, and he spent most of the week sleeping in a pup tent in freezing temperatures at ten thousand feet.
Three days after the World Series ended, when Billy was back at Fort Carson, he read that Marilyn Monroe had sued his old friend Joe DiMaggio for divorce. Monroe cited conflicting career demands. Billy was still contesting his divorce from Lois.
When the Yankees’ 1955 season began, Coleman had been sacked as the starter at second base and Rizzuto, now thirty-seven, was expected to be replaced by Billy Hunter, the former Browns and Orioles shortstop (and one-time hidden-ball-trick victim of Billy). McDougald had taken over at second base, but the Yankees were also looking at a nineteen-year-old second baseman from South Carolina, Bobby Richardson.
The Yankees trailed the Chicago White Sox for most of the season until late August, when Stengel suddenly announced that Billy would be granted a temporary leave from the army because of accrued time.
“Just in time to get us to the pennant,” Stengel crowed, who added that he planned to play Billy at shortstop.
On September 2, batting third and playing shortstop, Billy was in the Yankees’ lineup for the first time since the final game of the 1953 World Series.
Before the game, Billy addressed the team in a players-only meeting. He talked about how his absence from the Yankees had been a blow to his finances.
“I had to sell my Cadillac and my father’s car back home to get by this year,” Billy said in a voice that was stern and lecturing. “I’m broke. Broke, you hear me? I’m broke and we’re playing like we’re trying to lose. We have to get into this World Series. We have to!”
In the game that followed, Billy stroked a single and a double in a 4–2 win over the Washington Senators. The New York Times ran a picture of that day’s winning pitcher, Whitey Ford, flanked by Billy and Mickey, who hit a long home run. The Three Musketeers were reunited.
On September 23, in what was their fifteenth victory in their last twenty games, the Yankees clinched the pennant, defeating the Red Sox 3–2 when Billy, back at second base with Rizzuto at shortstop, drove in the winning run with a single in front of Boston center fielder Jimmy Piersall.
Billy played in just twenty games du
ring the 1955 regular season (his teammates nonetheless voted him a full share of the team’s World Series earnings, an amazing endorsement). He had 21 hits in 70 at-bats, the only season he hit .300 in his career. Entering the World Series against Brooklyn (who else?), the Yankees were seen as favorites, but mostly because they had beaten the Dodgers four times in the previous eight years and had not lost a World Series since 1942. Besides, Brooklyn was not happy about the Yankees having Billy back.
Interviewed the day before the series was to start, Jackie Robinson told writer Louis Effrat, “Billy is not brash or a dead-end kid or any of the other things people like to say about him. That’s his image. What he really is, is a smart player, cool and calculating. A player like that gets to be a pain in the neck to some people, but it has nothing to do with the man. He has always played up to the fullest all the times I’ve played with him.”
The Yankees won the first game behind Whitey Ford in a game that featured two controversial attempts to steal home. Jackie Robinson was called safe when it appeared he might be out. Billy, who also had a triple and a single in the game, was called out trying to steal home when it appeared he might be safe. The Yankees won the second game, 4–2, with Billy cleverly using his baseball acumen to significantly aid his team’s cause.
In the fourth inning of a game the Dodgers led 1–0, Billy tied the game with an RBI single to left field. But it’s what he did next that mattered most. The next batter, Ed Robinson, was hit by a pitch, which advanced Billy to second base and loaded the bases. With pitcher Tommy Byrne at the plate, Billy had a clear view of Brooklyn catcher Roy Campanella’s signals. Knowing Billy’s proclivity for stealing signals, every Yankees batter watched Billy closely if he was at second base.
After two pitches, Billy deciphered Campanella’s signal pattern and removed his cap, the signal to Byrne that he could forecast the pitches for him. The Yankees had a preset code in this instance; if Billy raised his right leg before the pitch, it was a fastball, if he raised his left leg, it was a curve. The 2–2 pitch was a fastball—as Billy had predicted—and Byrne laced it to center field for a two-run single. The Yankees never trailed in the game again.
Brooklyn won the next two games to tie the series. Billy was having another good World Series, but the evenly matched teams traded victories, setting up a tense Game 7 at Yankee Stadium.
The Dodgers had a 2–0 lead in the sixth inning when Billy led off with a walk and McDougald singled. The left-handed-hitting Yogi Berra, normally a pull hitter, went the other way, slicing a drive toward the left-field corner where Brooklyn’s Sandy Amoros ran it down just inside fair territory. Inexplicably, Amoros was not playing Berra to pull the ball. McDougald was doubled off first base on the play and the Yankees never seriously threatened again.
For the rest of his life, Billy could be riled to agitation if someone brought up Amoros’s play.
“There is no way Amoros should even be there,” Billy said. “Brooklyn had a good pitching staff and maybe we don’t win but that game should have been tied in the sixth inning.”
In the Yankees’ locker room after the loss, Billy pounded his fists on his locker until his knuckles bled. In tears, he hid out in the trainer’s room so reporters wouldn’t see him. One media member waited an hour for Billy to emerge, a lawyer from Brooklyn who dabbled in broadcasting named Howard Cosell.
Cosell complimented Billy on his play during the series—Billy had batted .320 with 4 RBIs.
“I’m disgusted that I let down Casey,” Billy told Cosell. “A man like that shouldn’t have to lose a World Series.”
Billy returned to Fort Carson three days later. He was discharged with an honor guard farewell in tribute. Outside the base, in uniform, Billy smiled for photographers. Pinned to his breast was his good conduct medal. That was a picture worth saving.
The next day he was back in Berkeley. In late October, he met Lois at a lawyer’s office on San Pablo Avenue where together they signed divorce papers formally ending their five-year marriage.
His cousin Nick drove Billy the few blocks to his mother’s house because Billy did not have a car. His bedroom on the second floor awaited. By all accounts, Billy did indeed rest for a while.
14
SINCE 1947, BILLY HAD approached every season with some measure of hope, uncertainty, or desperation. The stakes, it seemed, were always high, presaging another life-changing development. His career was usually hanging in the balance, or he had new personal responsibilities, like marriage or fatherhood.
But in 1956, things were different. For one, the Yankees were no longer defending world champions. It was Brooklyn’s time on the stage. The Yankees were still the Yankees, but writers felt little sizzle in their presence.
Calm and free of any controversy for the first time in years, Billy fit right in. With Rizzuto one year away from a forced retirement, Billy was nearly the elder statesman of the infield. He was healthy and had gained weight, a model of sinewy fitness: fifteen-inch collar, thirty-one-inch waist, with thick forearms and shoulders.
Billy the Kid, as he was incessantly called in print, turned twenty-eight on May 16. In a 4–1 victory over the Cleveland Indians that day, Billy hit a home run; Mantle hit two. The win put the Yankees in first place, where they stayed for the rest of the season. There were no formidable American League challengers, and the Yankees cruised. The only issue Stengel was having in 1956 was finding a replacement for Rizzuto. The Yankees’ brass knew that the double-play combination of the future was Tony Kubek at shortstop and Bobby Richardson at second base, but they were still raw minor leaguers. For now there was a revolving door of Yankees shortstops, including Rizzuto. It was not the Yankee Way but it was working in 1956.
There was no rocking the boat on a Yankees team that was destroying the rest of the American League. Mantle was having a year that would cement him as the player of the decade. He won the Triple Crown, leading the league in home runs (52), RBIs (130), and batting average (.353). Billy would end up hitting .264 with 9 home runs and 49 RBIs. He made the All-Star team for the only time in his career. Whitey won 19 games with just 6 losses and a league-leading ERA of 2.47.
The Three Musketeers were in the prime of their careers, and they had hardly slowed down off the field. They had never needed any schooling in how to be big league in that category. Whitey Ford remembered that when he was called up as a rookie, he met the team at its hotel in Boston in time for breakfast. Billy greeted him with that DiMaggio staple: blondes.
“Billy takes me into the lobby and standing there waiting for us are two of the most beautiful blondes I have ever seen in my life,” Ford wrote. “A couple of knockouts. Now, here we are, two rookies, one just up from the minor leagues that day and we’re parading through the lobby of the Kenmore Hotel with these gorgeous blondes. And the older guys like Allie Reynolds and Bobby Brown are standing there glaring at us because it looks like the girls have just come with us from our rooms. I haven’t even checked into my room, but it was a nice impression we made.”
Asked more than sixty years later if he recalled the scene Ford described, Brown answered, “No, not something I would have cared to recall. But yes, those guys knew how to live it up.”
Some of Billy’s childhood friends were old enough in 1956, or financially stable enough, to make trips to New York to stay with their old pal. They came back to the Bay Area with stories that seemed incomprehensible to those still living in the dingy neighborhood along the Berkeley docks.
Jack Setzer, an original member of the West Berkeley Boys, recalled going to dinner with Billy and heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano. They went to a nightclub where Frank Sinatra was singing. Setzer was stunned when he and Billy were seated near the stage and thunderstruck when Sinatra introduced Billy to the crowd and later joined them for a drink. The next night, while having dinner at the 21 Club, Setzer realized he was sitting one table away from Grace Kelly and Monaco’s Prince Rainier, who had been married that April. From the 21 Club Billy and Setzer wen
t to the Stork Club for drinks with Sid Caesar, Carl Reiner, and Doris Day.
“Billy not only knew all these people, he talked to them like they had grown up with him in Berkeley,” Setzer said. “There was no barrier. You were a big deal if you were a pro baseball player in New York in the 1950s.”
Billy did not lack for female companionship on any of these occasions, though anything resembling a steady girlfriend was rare, especially since the Yankees were on the road half the time. The lasting relationships were within the Three Musketeers, although Whitey, the New York native, had a house and a wife on Long Island and did not participate in the Manhattan nightlife with the same nonstop fervor that Billy and Mickey did. (Merlyn Mantle was chiefly preoccupied with her two young sons, including one named Billy, born in 1955.)
It was during 1956 that sportswriters began to hear rumors that the Yankees management was worried about Billy’s influence on Mickey, the face of the franchise if not Major League Baseball. In this tandem, it was always Billy leading Mickey astray and never the other way around. The drinking and carousing were never a mutually arrived-at choice. Mickey was always cast as the simple country boy corrupted by Billy, the cunning street kid. It may have been true, although Mickey did not change a bit when Billy eventually became his ex-teammate.
So the truth is probably more nuanced. The 1950s were marinated in alcohol. If the decade had a logo, it might show a lot of things—the birth of rock-and-roll, the growth of television, the expanded role of the automobile in an increasingly suburban society—but the best shape for a 1950s logo would be the outline of a martini glass. The term drinking responsibly is a modern notion. In the 1950s, the opposite was admired. Men had to drink often enough and long enough that they could learn to “handle it,” which was the ultimate compliment.
On job interviews for many white-collar positions, potential employees would be taken to lunch and observed. If they drank little or not at all, they probably wouldn’t get the job. If they drank and got tipsy, they wouldn’t get the job. If they drank and could handle it—at lunch, mind you—they were right for the job.
Billy Martin Page 15