by Allen Barra
When the Yankees were on the road, writers knew that the after-hours escapades often went well beyond boys being boys. If, in the fall of 1955, Mickey Mantle was not yet an alcoholic, he was well on the way. According to one anonymous Yankee, after a night game in Detroit both Mantle and Martin, thoroughly drunk, crawled out on the ledge outside their hotel room window on their hands and knees—twenty-two stories up. Unable to crawl backward to their room, they were forced to circle the building looking for an open window.
David Falkner, one of Mantle’s biographers, wrote that one night Mickey and Billy took him to dinner at the posh and pricey Harwyn Club, where they gawked at, among other celebrities, Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier. “We had dinner with Rocky Marciano. Can you believe that?” Actually, Rocky was seated at the next table. In such elegant surroundings, Mickey showed up with a whoopee cushion and slipped it onto a friend’s seat before he sat down. Hilarity ensued—at least at the Mantle-Martin table. Princess Grace’s response was not recorded.
After dinner, the merry pranksters went to a cocktail party. In the words of one of the party, “this real fancy place, like on the twentieth floor … and here’s Teresa Brewer sitting there.” Billy whispered in his ear that Brewer, one of the most popular female singers of the decade, “kind of liked Mickey a little bit.”1
There was one piece of very good news to begin the 1956 season with: both Mickey and Willie would be making a lot more money. Frank Scott, who had been handling endorsements for six Yankee players, including Mickey, began taking on new clients. According to Scott, it was Mickey who suggested to him that a popular black player such as Mays might be ready to cross over into the mainstream; Mays apparently had said as much to Mantle when they met at the All-Star Game and he asked Mickey to drop a word to Scott.
Scott, the Yankees’ traveling secretary for years, was fired by George Weiss when he refused to spy on the players’ late-night activities for the Yankees general manager.* He recounted their conversation years later for Dick Young: “Mr. Weiss, if you were to ask me whether such-and-such a ballplayer was out late, I would have to tell you and I will. But I can’t go running to the front office, voluntarily, with stories about the ballplayers.”2
Scott got the idea of handling endorsements when he visited the Berra family in New Jersey. Yogi, grateful for some arrangement Scott had made for him, opened a drawer full of new watches and told Scott to choose one. “Where’d you get those?” asked an astonished Scott. Yogi told him they had been given to him for doing pregame and postgame radio and TV shows as well as an occasional personal appearance. Scott shook his head; he knew that companies could afford to pay the players more than a watch for their time and trouble—which, he understood, they had bought in bulk.
Scott talked Yogi and then several other Yankees into letting him represent them for radio and TV appearances, personal appearances, and endorsements, both individually and in groups. At first some producers balked, saying that if he wanted, say, $500 for Yogi Berra or Mickey Mantle to do a personal appearance, they could get someone else cheaper. Scott called their bluff and put the biggest names in baseball under his wing. Soon producers began to meet Scott’s terms.
Before Willie joined Scott’s roster, Frank Forbes had been handling his endorsements, but they were usually smaller deals. The advertising departments for most products plugged by athletes assumed that black players didn’t have PR clout. Thanks to Scott, Mays’s endorsement income did go up—but the sad truth was that in 1955 Mays was the only black athlete to make substantial money off the field, and even with Scott on board, his endorsement fees never came close to Mantle’s. In 1956 Mays made perhaps $8,500 in appearance and endorsement fees, while Mantle pulled in over $70,000—but then, in 1956 Mantle’s career was off into the stratosphere.
When asked if Mays resented Mickey’s superior commercial pull, Monte Irvin responded, “Yeah, kind of. I think it always bothered him. Willie didn’t have an ounce of racism in him, and he really didn’t believe that most people responded to him with any kind of racial prejudice. I think he was really frustrated by his inability to make more money.”3
Charles Einstein was even more blunt: “Oh, I can tell you it bugged the hell out of him. And I’ll tell you something else: though he never said it publicly, Mickey was always resentful that his salary was never as big as Willie’s.”4
By 1962, Scott would have more than one hundred top athletes, most of them baseball players, in his talent pool. Dick Young wrote that Frank Scott represented more talent than any other man in sports. “Do you want Mickey Mantle for a hair goo commercial? Call Frank Scott. Do you want Warren Spahn for the Ed Sullivan show? Call Frank Scott. Do you want Don Drysdale to play the part of a lanky, two-gun villain on The Rifleman? Call Frank Scott.”5
In February 1956, Willie Mays got married. The news stunned even some of the writers who knew him best. The Giants’ paternalistic treatment of Willie had been so effective that no photograph of him with a woman had ever been published. Willie’s bride was Marghuerite Wendell. The two had been introduced in the spring of the previous year by Oscar Hammerstein at the Red Rooster, a popular Harlem restaurant where Willie had been known to hand out monogrammed sports shirts.
It would have been impossible to find two black people born in America in the 1930s who seemed more different than Willie and Marghuerite. No one knew exactly how old she was. She told some reporters that she was two years Willie’s senior, but one journalist claimed that she was at least six years older than the twenty-four-year-old Mays, and possibly more than that. She was stunning. Apparently she had come to New York from St. Louis when she was nineteen and somehow met Bill Kenny of the Ink Spots. A little more than a year later, she gave birth to a baby girl and told Kenny that he was the father; later she told him he was not. The child was taken in by Marghuerite’s family and dropped out of her narrative as soon as she married Mays; there is no mention of her in any subsequent stories regarding the couple.
Marghuerite later told reporters that she and Kenny had divorced in 1949, though there was no hard evidence they were ever married. She was married, legally, in 1954 to a Detroit doctor named Roland Chapman. The marriage lasted less than a year, but through Chapman she met former heavyweight champion Joe Louis, a native of Detroit, and was seen with him at nightspots in New York. (Some reports had it the other way around, that Louis had introduced her to Chapman.)
“Margie,” as her friends called her, knew virtually everyone who was anyone in black New York nightlife, from musicians like Dizzy Gillespie and Duke Ellington to boxers such as Sugar Ray Robinson. Interestingly, she knew nothing about baseball, though she called herself a Joe DiMaggio fan. At least she and Willie had that in common.
Though Willie had been seeing her for some time by the time the marriage was announced, only a couple of black papers had bothered to report on the relationship. According to Charles Einstein (who hadn’t known about the impending marriage even though he had just finished working with Willie on his first book, Born to Play Ball, published in 1955), Horace Stoneham tried to prevent the marriage. “We all heard that he [Stoneham] had talked to Roy Campanella and asked him to talk to Willie,” Einstein said. “At any rate, that’s what Roy later told me and others.”6
Stoneham was most displeased that Frank Forbes could not talk what he believed was sense into Willie. In fact, Willie was so incensed by Forbes’s attempts that it ended their relationship as well as the Giants’ association with Forbes. After the wedding, Roger Kahn—one of the few writers Mays trusted to do an interview—visited the newly-weds at their home in Queens, which was “more luxurious than anything I could imagine Willie being able to afford,” Kahn discovered.
“They had a huge television, I mean huge for the time. A screen maybe twenty inches, and two big closets just packed with clothes. If Willie had less than two dozen suits, I’d have been surprised.” On the wall were reproductions of paintings by the great masters in gilt-edged frames. “I’m guessing tha
t Willie had not selected those for his living room,” said Kahn.
“All the time,” Kahn recalled, “I kept staring at the furniture, the carpets, the satin bedspreads, and asking myself how all of this could have been covered by his salary. I don’t think he could have paid for it all even if he had been making the money Mickey Mantle was making on endorsements.”
Another thing that puzzled Kahn was “the lack of almost any family or close friends around Willie. Monte Irvin was a good friend, but they had had some kind of falling-out over a business affair—a liquor store, I think—and weren’t quite as close for a while as they had been. And one thing you never heard Willie talk about was Cat.” Mays had moved his father to New York in 1954 and rented him an apartment in Harlem. Willie took care of his father, but, said Kahn, who saw Cat on rare occasions at the ballpark, “Cat seemed increasingly pathetic. He told me once that he missed all his old friends back in Fairfield and Birmingham”—presumably the crowd that hung out at Bob’s Little Savoy—“and didn’t see or hear from Willie all that often.”7 No one had any way of knowing it at the time, but within a couple of short years Cat would be isolated from his son completely when the Giants left New York forever.
As he began the 1956 season, Mickey Mantle’s relationship with the press was no better than it had been five years before. Almost all the New York press corps liked him, or at least wanted to like him, but as Whitey Ford succinctly phrased it, “Mickey would always let a reporter know that he had asked his last question.”8 He could have been thankful, however, for at least one thing: in those days the press did not follow up on embarrassing rumors regarding ballplayers.
Either in the winter of 1954–55 or 1955–56—Mickey could never remember exactly which year this happened and gave three different accounts in his later life—Mantle came close to a good stiff jail sentence.
It happened when Mickey was in Oklahoma, bored, nursing an injury he’d sustained playing basketball.† The young man who just a few years before had been homesick for Commerce was now itching to get back to the Copa, Toots Shors’s place, and the rest of the New York nightlife. He fought off the ennui of a bleak Oklahoma winter by hanging with out-of-work pals, shooting pool, and drinking. One Friday night he took off to join his buddies at the 400 Club, a rowdy bar he had often heard about while in high school but didn’t see the inside of until he was twenty-four. Merlyn, calling to him from the front porch, asked him how long he’d be gone. Just a couple of hours, he replied.
Mickey went from boilermakers to scotch-and-soda to vodka to wine and finally to bourbon. Around five in the morning, thoroughly inebriated, he started home. On the way back, he saw some pals packing their car for a fishing trip. What the hell, he said, I’ll go with you. He did not, of course, bother to inform Merlyn or anyone else in his family. Falling asleep in the backseat, he did not wake up until the car pulled up at Lead Hill, Arkansas. Two days later, he finally arrived back home, thinking that somehow his wife would be placated by the tub full of bass he had caught. But even the thought of fresh fish for dinner did not improve Merlyn’s mood.
A few days later, he went out with his friends again; they dropped him off shortly before sunrise. He found his front door locked. After some futile pounding, he went to the garage and found that locked too. He then risked his million-dollar right hand by smashing the glass on the window panels, cutting himself on the shards. Upon lifting the garage door, he was startled to find the car gone, and then dumbfounded when he entered the house to find Merlyn and Mickey Jr. gone as well.
A neighbor who had been out with him heard the noise, got dressed, and walked over to find the American League’s All-Star center fielder bleeding profusely. His friend had the good sense to wrap up Mickey’s hand and drive him to the nearest hospital at Cardin. The doctor who gave him thirty stitches might have saved his career. The friend then drove him to his in-laws’ house, where Mickey’s outrageous behavior continued. He demanded the car keys from his father-in-law, who wisely refused after getting a good look at the dried blood on Mickey’s clothes and his bandaged hand. Mantle charged into the house, grabbed the keys off the kitchen table, went to the car, and, in front of his astonished father-in-law, threw Merlyn’s clothes (and several bags of groceries) all over the car. Then, jumping into the car, he backed up at full speed into a telephone pole.
He jumped out of the car and started running down the road toward town. Mr. Johnson got into his own car, picked up his son-in-law, and drove him home. The next day Merlyn and Mickey Jr. came back, and everything was okay again. For a while. Whispers of the incident made it back to New York, but nothing appeared in print. No sportswriter dared to risk his livelihood by alienating the New York Yankees’ front office.
Willie Mays also had some friends in the New York press. In the fall of either 1954 or 1955—Arnold Hano recalls it as ’55, but James Hirsch in his long biography of Mays places it in 1954—a pregnant woman claimed that Mays was the father of her child. Frank Forbes and Monte Irvin had worked hard to screen Willie from the legions of young females waiting around after Giants games, but they apparently could not watch him twenty-four hours a day. Mays flat out denied even knowing the woman, who hired a lawyer and demanded child support.
Forbes worked a small miracle to keep the incident out of the press. A couple of months later, a blood test was conducted, and the results indicated that Mays was not the father. The woman was not placated and claimed the test was phony. Roger Kahn always believed that she was bought off to keep her from going public, which would have been a huge embarrassment to Mays and the Giants. What was the truth? “I think the test was legitimate,” said Kahn, “and I don’t think Willie was the father. But I also think that the woman thought Willie really was the father, and that he could have been.”
“I also think,” said Kahn with a shrug, “that none of us tried very hard to find out the truth.”9
It’s a shame Willie Mays did not pick 1956 to have his best year. The season began with all kinds of undercurrents. Already, back in the spring of 1955, there had been rumors that despite the Giants’ World Series victory, the obnoxious Leo Durocher had had a falling-out with Horace Stoneham. One much-publicized cause was a testimonial dinner at a Los Angeles country club where Leo’s Hollywood friends, including Frank Sinatra, Bob Hope, Kirk Douglas, and Danny Kaye, had all appeared. Kaye brought the house down by walking out with his shirt hanging out and his fly open. After crashing into a table, he asked the crowd, “Where can a guy take a piss?” It was understood that Kaye, a devout Dodgers fan, was mocking Stoneham, who was known to have a drinking problem. Durocher, so the gossip columnists reported, had almost fallen out of his seat laughing; an item in The Sporting News related that “they’ll be talking about it [Kaye’s performance] from Toots Shor’s to the Stork Club for weeks.”§10 And they did. It was assumed by writers who followed the Giants that nothing short of a pennant, and perhaps not even that, could save Durocher’s job. They were right.
With just a few games left in the 1955 season, Durocher asked Mays to step into the tunnel behind the dugout, where he quietly told Mays that he would not be back as manager the next season. Willie was, Leo told him, the greatest ballplayer he had ever seen and he had already spoken to the new manager, Bill Rigney, about how to treat him. Then he leaned over and kissed Willie on the cheek. It was perhaps Durocher’s most gracious moment in a big league uniform. It would be Willie Mays, after all, who was responsible for Leo getting into the Hall of Fame, though Leo would not live to see the honor. Mays’s most comprehensive biographer, James Hirsch, said it this way: “Whatever his shortcomings as a person, Durocher’s development of Mays stands as a monumental contribution to baseball. Mays believes that in 1951, every other manager in the big leagues would have sent him back to the minors. That’s what any responsible manager would do with any young player in the throes of despair. Mickey Mantle, to take one example, was sent down as a rookie.… Had Mays returned to Minneapolis, his self-image shattered, his v
ulnerabilities exposed, the arc of his career would have been quite different.”11
Actually, Willie’s performance in 1956 was a great deal better than most people thought. Distracted, sometimes suffering from nervous exhaustion, and desperately missing Leo, he had his worst season—and his worst season, according to Total Baseball, was as good as any other player in the NL. (For that season Total Baseball ranks him in a virtual tie for best player with Milwaukee’s Hank Aaron, who led the Braves to a second-place finish, just one game behind the Brooklyn Dodgers.)
For the first and only time between his rookie season and 1964, Mays hit under .300—his final average was .296. He had 36 home runs, but only 84 RBIs. But the low RBI total was in large part because the Giants’ team batting average was just .244, tied with the Cubs for lowest in the NL. They were simply not getting runners on base, so there were relatively few for Willie to drive in. As if to compensate, he led the NL—in fact, both leagues—in stolen bases for the first time with the then-breathtaking total of 40 and also led NL outfielders in double plays with 6. Even though it didn’t look like it, Willie Mays was still the best all-around player in the National League.
But Mickey Mantle … as Yankees announcer Mel Allen put it, “The way he was in 1956, and in 1957, too, there was nothing like him in baseball history.”
If titles like “The Dean of American Sportswriters” were given solely on merit and not merely on readership, the Washington Post’s Shirley Povich would have been ranked up there with Red Smith in New York. Povich, one of the few progressive-minded writers in his profession, had championed Jackie Robinson, Larry Doby, and other black players before it was fashionable. Perhaps because he was an out-of-town writer—in New York anyone who wasn’t a New York writer was an out-of-town writer—he also worked hard at developing a working relationship with Mickey Mantle. In Florida, he wrote on April 4, “one feeling has been inescapable for the past month. This is Mickey Mantle’s year. This is the one when he’ll burst into full magnificence, hit more and longer home runs than anybody else, lead the league in batting, perhaps, and certainly get more extra base hits than anyone else.”12