Mickey and Willie

by Allen Barra

  For the most part, the press was obliging in not mentioning the story or simply dismissing it as fiction. Looking back, it appears that a great deal of it was not fiction. Holly insisted that she had loaned Savitt $1,500 in cash in 1951 with the promise that if he didn’t pay it back by early 1952, she would own 25 percent of Mickey’s burgeoning endorsements empire. Of course, when she had first met Mickey, he was not married, but, she said in the story, they had continued to see each other over the years, including in the late summer of 1956. Apparently, she felt she was still entitled to the 25 percent, even though the Yankees’ lawyers had long since voided the contract Mickey had so foolishly signed. The Confidential story, then, was her way of collecting what she thought was her due.

  One detail she revealed was that she had met Mickey at a small club called Danny’s Hideaway, which over the years would prove to be a fateful venue for Mickey and the Yankees. It was one of Mickey’s favorite nightspots, and in May 1957, Mickey, Billy Martin, Whitey Ford, Hank Bauer, Yogi Berra, Johnny Kucks, and their wives gathered there to celebrate Billy Martin’s birthday. According to Mickey, “We had dinner at Danny’s Hideaway and then someone said we had time to catch Sammy Davis, Jr. at the Copa.”20 Every Yankee fan knows what happened next. Or rather, no one really knows what happened.

  The legend is that some members of a bowling team at a nearby table got rowdy and rude and shouted some insults at Davis—Mantle would later recall he heard the slur “Little Black Sambo.” A while later, the chief instigator of the group, a man named Edwin Jones, was laid out on the floor near the men’s room by either Billy Martin or Hank Bauer (who, despite his Marine Corps background, was never known to have engaged in a public brawl) or, perhaps more likely, one of the Copa’s bouncers. Yogi Berra, whom everyone trusted, famously insisted that “nobody done nothin’ to nobody.”

  But for solidarity’s sake and to appease the daily papers, which had a field day with the incident, the Yankees’ front office fined everyone. Mantle, Berra, Ford, Bauer, and Martin were fined a stiff $1,000; Kucks, who made a great deal less than the better-known players, was fined only $500. So was Gil McDougald, who never even made it to the Copa. Clearly, the fines were intended as a message to the public that the Yankees intended to keep their house in order: they were announced before the group even appeared in court. Gil McDougald was perhaps the most furious. At the end of the season, though, when the players picked up their World Series checks, they found that the amount of their fine had been added to the total.

  During the court hearing, the district attorney took less than an hour to determine that there was insufficient evidence to convict Bauer or any other Yankee; Jones subsequently dropped his case against Bauer as well. George Weiss, however, did not drop his case against Billy Martin, whom he had long since decided was a bad influence on Mantle. Someone had to go, and it was certainly not going to be the most valuable property in the major leagues. But Weiss did not make a move right away.

  Almost a month later, on June 13, during a game with the White Sox, the Yankees’ Art Ditmar knocked Larry Doby down, part of an ongoing brushback war between the two teams. Doby, who had been sensitive to knockdowns since becoming the American League’s first black player with Cleveland in 1947, was furious and, according to Ditmar, said that if he threw that close to him again, he’d stick a knife in his back—although Doby always denied having said this. Ditmar responded by suggesting that Doby have sexual relations with himself. Doby rushed the mound, threw a punch, missed, and both benches emptied. Just when it looked as if order had been restored, Martin asked Ditmar what Doby had said to him, and Ditmar foolishly mentioned the knife comment. Martin went ballistic and attacked Doby and nearly started the brawl all over again. Or at any rate, he would have if the two sides hadn’t been stunned by Martin’s behavior. The Yankees’ Tommy Byrne thought that Billy had “lost his nut.”

  Martin’s hysterical attack on Doby gave Weiss as much of an excuse to get rid of him as anything that did or didn’t happen at the Copa. Two days later, the word came down that Billy had been traded to the American League’s version of limbo, the Kansas City Athletics. Petulant and hopelessly irresponsible, he blamed Casey Stengel for not standing up for him and held a grudge against the old man for years.

  The New York Giants used Frank Forbes and Monte Irvin as Willie’s surrogate big brothers to screen him from what they regarded as the wrong kind of females and other kinds of trouble. On the other side of town, the Yankees left Mickey Mantle unprotected, and the result was Holly Brooke, a disreputable agent, and incidents of public drunkenness with Billy Martin. Both ballplayers, however, grew into manhood without maturing into men.

  Bill Rigney, who at first had a rough time communicating with Mays, finally made a breakthrough. “Willie does not need a manager,” he told reporters, “so much as a father figure.”21 Of Mickey Mantle, precisely the opposite could have been said.

  The Christmas of 1957 was the last one Mickey and Merlyn would spend in Commerce. Mickey’s old town no longer provided relief from the pressures of New York. With family, old friends, and former schoolmates showing up at the door at all hours, many asking for autographs, favors, or handouts, life at home was no longer relaxing. Mickey would slip out at nights for drinking binges with a few of his closest friends, with many of whom he had played sandlot ball. That was it. The next year he insisted that they not go back to Oklahoma for the holidays. Merlyn would miss her own family and friends, but went along with Mickey’s wishes.

  There were compensations. No matter how much he drank, Merlyn later wrote in her own memoir, “Mick never slapped me or hit me or tried to hurt me.… I could push the bad times aside because it is very easy to get caught up in the American way of fame. I was bored, and when I did get to be a part of it, I enjoyed the life style.”22 Both Merlyn Mantle and Marghuerite Mays were unhappy in many ways, but they both enjoyed the lifestyle.

  * Or that, at least, was the way Scott told the story. He told the players that he quit because he refused to spy on them, a decision that earned him a loyal following. Scott, who was my neighbor in nearby Maplewood, New Jersey, until his death in 1998, always insisted that he quit. He once told me, “The Yankees have my letter of resignation. You can find it in their files.” I never went to look for it, but I have no doubt it was there.

  † Just after the World Series, Mickey had put together an amateur basketball team, the Mickey Mantle—Southwest All-Stars, consisting of players from his friend Harold Youngman’s construction business (industrial leagues back then often had basketball as well as baseball teams) and some friends and family, such as his brothers Roy and Ray. They were good, and in two real games against the visiting Harlem Globetrotters they proved indeed that white men could jump. Mickey coached and played—foolishly, as it turned out. On a fast break, he twisted his bad knee and was taken the next day to a Springfield, Missouri, hospital. His old friend Dr. Yancey removed a piece of torn cartilage. He would have a slight limp right into spring training.

  ‡ Courtesy, lest we forget, of the Harlem Globetrotters.

  § In case there were any doubts about how Leo felt about Stoneham, it should be remembered that he included the incident in all its gross detail in his 1976 autobiography, Nice Guys Finish Last.

  ‖ At an Atlantic City autograph show in the spring of 1982 featuring Mantle and Mays, I purchased a button slightly bigger than a fifty-cent piece with a photo of Brewer in a Yankees uniform with a bat on her shoulder and a smiling Mick, wearing a polo shirt and also holding a bat, with the caption “I Love Mickey.” It cost me $10. I would happily have paid three times as much.

  13

  “Exactly the Same Ballplayer”

  On September 29, 1957, an overcast Sunday, at approximately 4:20 PM, Willie Mays came to bat as a New York Giant for the last time. The Giants were down, 9–1, in the ninth as the Pirates’ Bob Friend nearly shut them out with only six hits, two of them by Mays. Arnold Hano described it this way: “There was a siz
eable round of applause as he took his last stance. He shifted his feet around, his head down. A pitch came in and another, and the count was one-and-one, and all the time the applause was building, over 11,000 fans rising out of their seats. Pretty soon the applause was so loud that Mays had to acknowledge it. He stepped out of the box and touched his hand to his cap. It was, to me, another first.

  “I do not recall hearing another ovation given a man after the pitcher has started to work on him. The whole business was unsettling to Mays. ‘I never felt so nervous,’ he has since said. ‘My hands were shaking. It was worse than any World Series game. I tried to hit a home run. I tried very hard to show them how I felt. I wanted to do something for the fans.’

  “He tried too hard, the way a man will, and hit a ground ball to short. He was out at first, and when he trotted back to the Giant dugout, the applause followed him. Dusty Rhodes hit another ground ball to short; the Giants had lost their fourth ballgame in a row, and the Giants’ tenancy at the Polo Grounds was over. The fans poured onto the field, running past and over the stadium guards. They tore up the bases and uprooted home plate, ripped the fences and the bullpen benches and chased the players all the way to the dressing room stairs.”

  The guests of honor, among whom were numerous old Giants greats, including Sal Maglie and Carl Hubbell, and John McGraw’s widow, Blanche, filed quietly out of the Polo Grounds. Ray Robinson, who edited the paperback series “Baseball Stars of the 1950s,” recalls that “it was not exactly the kind of occasion you remember with fondness. It was an ugly day, and Willie Mays was leaving forever.”1 (Robinson had no way of knowing that little more than a year later he would see Willie playing in New York again, at least for one game.)

  Two fans out in left field mournfully waved signs. The first read, GO, TEAM, GO, while the second one read, STAY, WILLIE, STAY. Almost as if in response, Willie popped out of the dugout and waved to the remaining fans. No one ever asked him whether he was saying good-bye to the fans or grabbing one last look at the Polo Grounds.

  It was the last game in New York for several writers, who would be shifted to other assignments. One of them, Charles Einstein, would follow Mays and the Giants to San Francisco to cover baseball for the San Francisco Examiner. (The year before, he had relocated from New York to Arizona, where he followed the team through spring training.) Some who had at least a passing acquaintance with professional football, which had been rapidly gaining in popularity thanks to increased television exposure, were shifted to that beat. Still others gathered up their things—a coffee cup, an ashtray, a scorecard, a souvenir that had no value except to them—and looked around at the press box they would never see again.*

  A lucky few got the plum assignment of covering the Yankees, who would be, starting in 1958, the only game in town. “In the press box at the Stadium,” Hano wrote, perhaps unfairly but with the conviction of a true believer, “after a ball has been hit to deep center, where it falls behind Mickey Mantle or whoever, there is a delighted laugh and someone will say, ‘Willie Mays would have had it.’ Nobody argues.”2

  The beginning of the end had come on August 19, 1957, when Horace Stoneham held a press conference to announce what everybody feared was true: “We’re going to San Francisco in 1958.” A reporter asked Stoneham, “How do you feel about the kids in New York from whom you are taking the Giants?” “I feel bad about the kids,” Stoneham replied. “I’ve seen lots of them at the Polo Grounds, but I haven’t seen many of their fathers lately.”

  It was true. Attendance in the old ballpark had been dwindling over the previous two seasons. In 1957 fewer than 656,000 had turned out. In fact, it was true for most of the teams in the so-called golden age of baseball. Three of the big leagues’ original sixteen teams had already moved—the St. Louis Browns back east to the baseball-rich city of Baltimore, and the Philadelphia A’s and Boston Braves out west to, respectively, Kansas City and Milwaukee. The old urban ballparks were harder and harder for whites who had moved to the suburbs to travel to, and many of the ballparks were crumbling and poorly serviced. New York, in its arrogance, had ignored all the warning signs.

  There had been all kinds of negotiations going on behind the scenes for months. One story had Stoneham trying to make a deal for the team to move to St. Louis; yet another had the Giants moving to fresh territory for major league baseball in Minnesota. For years afterward, baseball writers would argue whether Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley—who was moving his team from Brooklyn to Los Angeles—had talked Stoneham into the move, but in retrospect, it was inevitable. The Giants were leaving, and the city that gave them by far the best deal was San Francisco.

  In San Francisco, after all, Stoneham’s Giants could continue their long, bitter rivalry with O’Malley’s Dodgers, and California already had a long and storied history in professional baseball. The Pacific Coast League’s San Francisco Seals (who would move to Phoenix, Arizona, as part of the Giants organization) and Oakland Oaks had a well-established rivalry, as did both of the Wrigley family’s teams, the Los Angeles Angels and San Diego Padres, down south.

  No big league fan had to be told that Ted Williams (formerly of the Padres) and Joe DiMaggio (of the Seals) were products of the PCL. Over the years the Yankees in particular had mined the Bay Area, not only for DiMaggio but for Tony Lazzeri, Lefty Gomez, and Billy Martin, while the Brooklyn Dodgers had taken first baseman Dolph Camilli (the NL’s 1941 MVP), the Cincinnati Reds catcher Ernie Lombardi, and the Washington Senators shortstop Joe Cronin, who played for twenty years, mostly for the Red Sox and Senators. And of course, there were DiMaggio’s two brothers—Dom, who played his entire career for the Red Sox, and Vince, who played for five different teams over a ten-year career.

  Though Mays did not know it, there was a great deal of resentment waiting for him in his new city. For the first time in his professional baseball career, Willie Mays would experience booing, and the reason was one Mickey Mantle could have warned him about: he wasn’t Joe DiMaggio.

  In January, the Giants held a press conference at Seals Stadium, where they would be playing their home games, to publicize the signing of Willie’s 1958 contract for $67,500; only Ted Williams, at about $100,000, and Stan Musial, at an estimated $80,000, were paid more. (This was only a few months after the American League’s two-time MVP, Mickey Mantle, was trying and failing to get $65,000.) Willie chatted with reporters while Marghuerite, wearing a full-length mink coat, vogued in the background with her poodle Pepy on a leash.

  Few of the writers present had actually seen Mays play. In November of the previous year, after the season had ended, Mays had barnstormed into the Bay Area, leading a team of black major leaguers such as former Negro League stars Henry Aaron, who had won the MVP Award in 1957, and Ernie Banks, who would win it in 1958 and 1959, to play two games against some local minor leaguers, mostly Pacific Coast League veterans. Jim Hamilton, later a journalist and scriptwriter for Sam Peckinpah, recalled going to one of the games with his family. Hamilton noted that the crowd was composed mostly of blacks and Latinos. “We were surprised because all of the big leaguers were great players, and, of course, we all knew that Willie Mays would be coming here in just a few months. Most local fans knew the PCL players too.”

  The pitcher for the minor leaguers—Hamilton did not recall his name—was supposed to have been a former Negro Leagues player who had known Willie back when he was a teenager with the Birmingham Barons. Perhaps miffed because he had never gotten his big league shot, the pitcher threw a pretty good fastball right in the direction of Mays’s head, which was covered by nothing more than a New York Giants cap.†

  Willie got up and glared at the mound, meeting the pitcher’s cold stare in a blaze of indignation. On the next pitch, said Hamilton, “Willie lunged with that huge, sweeping swing and pulled a slightly outside pitch over a clock in deep left-center field.” How far was the shot? “I’m not sure,” Hamilton said. “The fence to dead center was about 430, and this ball was at least twenty feet past
that, probably more. Since the ball was hit over the clock, I’d have to say it was 460 to 470 feet.” A stringer from the San Francisco Chronicle remarked, “I think that’s farther than any home run Mickey Mantle has ever hit.” Only two writers, both stringers from the Bay Area papers, had shown up to cover the game.

  San Francisco prided itself on its sophistication, and certainly in relation to most of the country at the time, the city possessed a liberal attitude about race. But a short time after Willie and Marghuerite rented an apartment, a brick crashed through their window. Neither had ever experienced anything like it in their lives. For his part, Willie had never crossed any racial barriers in Alabama that would have provoked such a hostile act. Charles Einstein, who was there, saw it this way: “For the fact that they could now call themselves big-league, San Franciscans welcomed the Giants with open arms. The greeting for Willie Mays superstar was somewhat more restrained. To chauvinistic residents of the Bay Area, Mays was the hated embodiment of New York. Also he had the temerity to play center field at Seals Stadium where the native-born DiMaggio had played in his minor-league days. Also Mays was black. The brick that crashed through his apartment window almost as soon as he moved in had to reflect at least one of those viewpoints, if not all three.”‡3

  Willie and Marghuerite had left New York in debt, largely because of her extravagance. According to one source, Willie had borrowed as much as $65,000 against his salary. They did not yet know where they would be living in the San Francisco area or how much a home would cost them. All they had been told was that good houses there did not come cheap. As it turned out, good houses for blacks, even in one of the most progressive-minded cities in the country, scarcely came at all. In November, the San Francisco Chronicle shocked not only Bay Area readers but fans all over the country with an article that related the Mayses’ problems in closing a deal on a house. One man, Walter Gnesdiloff, had turned down the couple even when they met the asking price for his house. His sentiments echoed those of many white Americans of the time: “I’m just a union working man,” he said. “I’d never get another job if I sold this house to that baseball player. I feel sorry for him, and if the neighbors said it was okay, I would do it.”4