Mickey and Willie

by Allen Barra

  Five days later, before a game with the Dodgers, Willie appeared at Shea for what Mayor John Lindsay proclaimed as “Willie Mays Day.” With him were Cat, who flew in from Oakland, Mae, and Michael, who was so seldom seen with his father in public that even writers who had followed Willie for years were asking who he was. A handful of baseball greats such as Joe DiMaggio, Stan Musial, Larry Doby, Duke Snider, and Pee Wee Reese were there, as was a man whose name would forever be entwined with Willie’s, Vic Wertz. Some Mets fans brought along pictures of Mays’s catch in the ’54 Series for Wertz to sign. The Daily News’s Vic Zeigel asked Wertz if he resented being asked to sign a picture in which he did not appear, one that commemorated a hit taken away from him. “Hell,” replied a smiling Wertz, “it’s the first time in 15 years anyone’s asked me to sign anything.”

  There were enough gifts to stock a month of episodes of The Price Is Right, including a pair of Chryslers for Willie and Mae. More spectacular, though, was a Mercedes-Benz with a card from … Horace Stoneham. There were also bottles of champagne and scotch whiskey; no one had told Teacher’s and Moet, both advertisers on Mets broadcasts, that Willie did not drink. The strangest gift was from heavyweight champion Joe Frazier, who presented Willie with a gorgeous new snowmobile.

  Mays dabbed his eyes and made a few short dignified remarks to the sold-out crowd, ending with: “I see these kids over here, and I see how these kids are fighting for a pennant, and to me it says one thing: Willie, say good-bye to America.” He then waved his cap, hugged his wife and son, and picked up a box of long-stemmed roses. Walking over to the first-base line, he presented them to the Mets’ revered seventy-year-old owner, Joan Whitney Payson, seated in a wheelchair. Payson leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. Payson had done more than anyone else to bring Willie back to New York.

  And yet, in surely one of the strangest endings to a great player’s career, there was not a single gift or note from the New York Mets organization. No explanation for this has ever been given.

  * The name of Mantle’s short-lived chain of restaurants has been incorrectly identified by biographers. Mantle and his backer chose “Country Kitchen,” but a Wisconsin-based company informed Mick’s lawyers that they already owned that title. So shortly before the restaurants opened, everything was hastily changed to “Mickey Mantle’s Country Cookin’.” That was the name of the one in Birmingham.

  Mickey’s restaurants have also been incorrectly identified as “fast food.” Actually, they were cafeteria-style restaurants of a sort popular in the South and parts of the Midwest where customers had their choice of chicken, fish, ham, or beef and three vegetables with biscuits or cornbread—“meat and three,” as they still say in Alabama.

  † Mickey’s restaurant chain went public in June 1969. Mantle thought “we served the best chicken you ever ate, not to mention the beans and ham hocks, chicken-fried steak, creamed gravy, beef stew, and ice tea in Mason jars.” He was right; the food was great. But the venture made Mantle a millionaire only on paper. The financial end of the business was grossly mishandled; after the majority stock changed hands several times, the chain was bankrupt the following year (Dick Young, “Farewell to Mickey Mantle,” Sport, April 1969).

  ‡ Mantle, though he never openly rebelled against him, never got along with Keane. “After all those years in the major leagues,” he said, “I was too old to knuckle under to Keane’s regimentation and his silly little high school rules” (Mantle and Gluck, The Mick, p. 214). Keane was fired in 1966 after the Yankees won just four of their first twenty games. Ralph Houk replaced him.

  § Nearly forty years later Miller told me, “I never heard Willie Mays speak with that kind of conviction, either before or after. One of my great regrets is that I did not have a tape recorder on for Willie’s speech. I wrote it down afterwards as much as I could remember.”

  ‖ James Hirsch felt that “Berra resented Mays being there in the first place. Years later, he was discussing his problems as a Yankee manager when George Steinbrenner kept interfering with the roster. ‘It was not just one guy like Willie Mays when he came to the Mets in 1973,’ Berra said, ‘it was four or five guys who Steinbrenner wanted and the coaches and I didn’t’ ” (Hirsch, Willie Mays: The Life, the Legend, p. 517). “Resented” sounds like the wrong word here. I spent most of 2008 and 2009 working on a biography of Berra, and I never heard anyone use the word “resent” in connection with him. That Berra thought Mays couldn’t help his team is more likely, and judging from the results, Berra’s judgment was justified.

  18

  Burden of Dreams

  I mourn the season of my youth

  In which I revel’d more than most.

  — FRANÇOIS VILLON

  On August 10, 1974, a chartered bus left Manhattan for Cooperstown, New York; the passengers included Mickey Mantle, Phil Rizzuto, Carl Lombardi (a pal of Mickey’s from their sandlot days in Oklahoma), Whitey Ford, and Lovell Mantle, who had come all the way from Oklahoma for the occasion. They were there to see Mickey and Whitey inducted into the Hall of Fame. Mickey’s vote was impressive; 322 of 365 for slightly better than 88 percent. Still, it seems odd that forty-three baseball writers did not deem Mickey Mantle worthy of the Hall of Fame.

  In his induction speech, Mantle thanked Commissioner Bowie Kuhn—who, in just nine years’ time, would ban Mickey from major league baseball—not just for listing his accomplishments, “but for leaving out those strikeouts. He gave all those records but he didn’t say anything about all those strikeouts. I was the world champion in striking out.… I don’t know for sure, but I’m almost positive I must have that record in the World Series too.” Mickey thanked his dad, his mom, his family, old high school and sandlot pals, and Barney Barnett, his manager on the Baxter Springs Whiz Kids, who had died two years before. Sticking to the legend, he thanked Tom Greenwade for discovering him. He also thanked Casey Stengel, who had ridden him hard, and Joe DiMaggio, who had all but ignored him during his rookie season. After the ceremony, he showed his mother his shining new Hall of Fame ring. Whitey Ford recalled that Lovell looked at Mickey and asked, “Who in hell is in the Hall of Fame?” Mickey looked at Whitey and grinned, “Well, that’ll put you in your place, won’t it?”1

  The Hall of Fame induction was one of the few times in the decade that most of Mickey’s family was together. Later, he could not remember where he was when he got the news that his son Billy, whom he had named for Billy Martin, was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease. The news devastated Mickey and helped confirm his fatalistic view of life. Mickey had made it past the age when most of the men in his family had died of Hodgkin’s, but now a new guilt weighed upon him: the disease had passed him up only to strike his nineteen-year-old son.

  Mickey didn’t pray for his son; he once confessed to a writer that he didn’t even know how to say the Lord’s Prayer. Hodgkin’s did not get Billy, who, like his three brothers and both parents, was an alcoholic and developed heart disease. He was thirty-six when he finally succumbed to a heart attack in 1994. His father was in the Betty Ford Center when Billy died.

  Mickey Mantle was always there for me, even in retirement. His image of eternal youth, grace, speed, and power was ingrained on my mind’s eye whenever I saw baseball played. To the outside world in the 1970s, by contrast, it was as if he had ceased to exist. Now and then, though, he popped up in the most unlikely places.

  In the spring of 1977, working on a story for the Birmingham News, I interviewed the diva of local theater, Margie Bolding. Margie was performing the one-woman show I Don’t Want to Be Zelda Anymore, inspired by the wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald. We met at her century-old house on the crest of Red Mountain, with its panoramic views of the city and walls covered with family memorabilia. (The Rev. O. T. Bolding’s five daughters—“the Fabulous Bolding Girls,” Margie laughingly recalled—had moved to Birmingham as teenagers.) When I took off my jacket, revealing a navy blue Yankees spring training shirt with MANTLE on the back—the kind that wasn’t
used during Mantle’s career—Ms. Bolding beamed. “Turn off the recorder,” she said, “and I’ll tell you about me and Mickey.” And she did.

  Margie was living in New York when she met Mickey at the Harwyn Club on East Fifty-Second Street in Manhattan. This was in the midst of Mickey’s greatest season, 1956, when he was chasing Babe Ruth’s home run record, the Triple Crown, and just about anything attractive in a skirt.* Margie, an aspiring actress, was tall, blond, and statuesque in 1956—even as she was still in 1977. She was waiting for friends when the maître d’ politely informed her that “Mr. Mantle requests that you join him.” “I told him that I didn’t know who Mr. Mantle was,” but, she said in relating the story to me, “of course I knew who he was. That is, I certainly recognized the name. There wasn’t anyone in New York and probably very few in America who didn’t know who Mickey Mantle was. But I wasn’t going to admit that to the maître d’ or to ‘Mr. Mantle.’ ”

  Unlike Tallulah Bankhead, another actress from Alabama who had come to New York two decades before, Margie didn’t know a thing about baseball. She did know, however, that a well-bred southern girl did not go to a strange man’s table, even if that man was possibly the most famous man in the country. She told the messenger that she would be receptive toward Mr. Mantle joining her. Mantle did not. He did, however, follow her into the powder room, where, with a grin as big as the Oklahoma sky, he told her, “You got the prettiest blue eyes I’ve ever seen.”

  It became, she told me, a “unique relationship” that lasted for decades. There were high times, some of them in public. Once, in P. J. Clarke’s while Mickey, Margie, and her sister Bonnie were eating hamburgers in a backroom, a customer shouted something abusive—or at least it sounded that way to Bonnie, who, blessed with what Margie called “that Fabulous Bolding Girl temper,” picked up a bottle of ketchup from which the cap had been removed and threw it at the man, splattering ketchup all over him. Mantle immediately jumped up. The man said, “That’s okay, Mickey. Any woman with Mickey Mantle who wants to cover me with ketchup is okay by me.” (They invited him to join the party.)2

  When I spoke to Margie again a few years ago, she offered few details about her and Mickey except to say that he had once bought her a pair of cowboys boots with red hearts at Billy Martin’s country and western store. He got them tickets to Yankees games, both in New York and on the road; once, when Bolding was in Chicago with her son Ernie, Mickey called out, “Hi, kid!” and, as Margie recalled it, hit a home run for him. And when her mother, Gertha, was in the hospital, Mickey surprised her by dropping by her room with flowers. “He could really surprise you sometimes by being so thoughtful,” she said.

  Recently Bolding sat down and penned a posthumous letter to Mickey, drawing on years of memories. You can hear her reading it, at times in tears, online (Google “Margie Bolding Open Letter to Mickey Mantle”). The lines I like best: “You used people and allowed people to use you and you were generous to a fault,” “You were kind to my family and my son,” and “Life was too short, there never was enough time for you to discover the real you that I knew and loved.”

  When Commissioner Bowie Kuhn stood on a stage in Cooperstown on August 5, 1979, to introduce Willie Mays, no one could have had any idea that in a few months’ time Kuhn would be the man who banished Willie Mays from baseball. “Willie Mays needs no embroidery,” Kuhn told the raucous Cooperstown crowd. The excited fans chanted, “Wil-lee!, Wil-lee!” so loudly that Mays’s first words could scarcely be heard. Apparently casting aside the outline of his speech, Willie gave an impromptu history of his life, starting with “My uncle told me when I was ten, ‘Boy, you have to be a ballplayer.’ And my high school principal told me, ‘We will put you out of school if you don’t play sports.’ ” Curiously, Cat Mays, who was there, was not mentioned by his son, and Willie revised some history about his high school principal, who had actually told him he could get paid for playing baseball with the Black Barons if he played football for Fairfield Industrial. Willie thanked the Birmingham Black Barons: “We had twenty-five guys on the club, and all twenty-five would put me to bed every night. I didn’t get to meet many girls that way, but I got plenty of sleep.” (Actually, while Willie was there the Barons usually had an active roster of sixteen.) It was odd that he did not acknowledge Piper Davis, without whom he might never have made it to the major leagues.

  He thanked Leo Durocher, who was in attendance, profusely, and called Giants owner Horace Stoneham “my backbone.” He forgave the city of San Francisco for not appreciating him enough: “It took them about five years to get used to me there. They had another center fielder. His name was Joe DiMaggio” (though in fact DiMaggio had been gone from San Francisco nearly twenty-three years when the Giants moved there).

  At least a couple of Willie’s remarks were incomprehensible. “Baseball,” he told the crowd, “means dedication. You have to sacrifice many things to play baseball. I sacrificed a bad marriage, and I sacrificed a good marriage. But I’m here today because baseball is my number-one love.” One wonders, what good marriage did Willie sacrifice? Would Marghuerite have been any less a disaster for Willie if he hadn’t been traveling? And he certainly didn’t “sacrifice” his marriage to Mae, who turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to him. Was Mae perhaps a bit hurt to find out that baseball, not she, was Willie’s “number-one love”?

  The vote for Willie’s induction was 409 of 432, just under 95 percent. That was higher than any of the post—World War II players whose careers overlapped Willie’s, including Joe DiMaggio, Stan Musial, Ted Williams, and Mickey Mantle. In fact, it was the highest vote for any player since the initial five greats—Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner, Walter Johnson, Christy Mathewson, and Babe Ruth—were selected in 1936. And yet … when Willie Mays retired, he was second only to Babe Ruth on the all-time home run list, with 660. He had scored 2,062 runs and driven in 1,903, had batted over .300 ten times, had stolen 338 bases, was regarded by many as the greatest defensive outfielder of all time, won two MVP Awards (and should have won seven or eight), and played in twenty-four All-Star Games, more than anyone else … and there were still twenty-three cretins who called themselves baseball writers who did not think Willie Mays merited a plaque in the Hall of Fame. Just think about that.

  A few months later, Willie would have his run-in with Commissioner Bowie Kuhn. The story began with Al Rosen, who had been a four-time All-Star third baseman and two-time home run champ with the Cleveland Indians in the 1950s—he had been a runner on first base when Vic Wertz hit the fly ball that Mays made into his immortal catch in Game 1 of the 1954 World Series. In 1979, Rosen had quit his job as president of the New York Yankees to become executive vice president of Bally’s International. At the time, the most famous sports representative employed by Bally’s—some would have called him a greeter—was longtime heavyweight champion Joe Louis, but by 1980 Louis was sixty-four and in failing health. (He would die the next year.)

  Rosen had a flash: perhaps the most admired former athlete under the age of fifty was Willie Mays. Rosen offered Mays a ten-year, $100,000-a-year contract—an appealing offer, considering the job pretty much amounted to playing golf and being seen at the Atlantic City casino’s public relations and charity events. Willie, who was working for the Mets as a batting coach, told Rosen he was interested. Bowie Kuhn, one of the most ineffectual baseball commissioners ever, decided to interfere and told Mays he would have to choose between the Mets job and Bally’s offer. If he chose Bally’s, he would be banned from all future major league functions. Mae Mays told the New York Times that “Willie faced this trauma two other times in his life. First when he was traded, then when he retired. We sat around our apartment in Riverdale last night with Willie’s lawyer and accountant, using them as a sounding board.”3 Mays pleaded with Kuhn, who wouldn’t budge; Willie needed the money and took the job with Bally’s.

  Kuhn’s pronouncement was the act of a pompous and uncompassionate man. Kuhn was supposedly worried about gam
bling infiltrating baseball, but as James Hirsch phrased it, “The reality was that Mays could in no way affect the outcome of a Major League Baseball game while schmoozing with patrons of a New Jersey casino. He wasn’t working for a bookie. The casino had nothing to do with sports betting. All activities in the casino were legal, and under state law Mays wasn’t even permitted to gamble there. Part of his job involved going to schools, where he would urge kids not to smoke and drink. He also told them not to gamble.”4

  At a press conference announcing his decision, Willie nearly broke into sobs. “What skills,” he asked rhetorically, “do I have outside of baseball? Only public relations, dealing with people.” Still, he would not try to challenge Kuhn’s decision legally: “That’s challenging baseball. I’m not here for that.” Willie Mays was never a man to challenge authority. But then, authority had always worked pretty much in Willie’s favor.

  Nonetheless, the hiring of Mays proved to be a public relations bonanza for Bally’s. The only question was why it took the Claridge Casino, which was right across the way from Bally’s, three years to realize that Mickey Mantle could do a similar job—minus lecturing school kids on the evils of drinking, one assumes—for them. For Mickey, the decision to go with the casino was much less gut-wrenching than it had been for Willie. The only job Mickey had had connected with baseball was as a Yankees batting coach, and as he was quick to tell any reporters who would listen, “I wasn’t much of a batting coach.”