A Season in the Sun

by Randy Roberts

  MICKEY DEMANDED THE Hero’s salary. In 1956, he reportedly earned $32,500, $20,000 less than Yogi Berra. He had clearly proven his value to the Yankees and expected compensation for it. George Weiss had different ideas. In an age before free agency, when the reserve clause tethered a player to one club in perpetuity, Mantle lacked leverage. He could not test his worth on the open market or negotiate with any club executive other than Weiss. When they met in New York in January 1957, Mantle asked the general manager to double his pay. Weiss balked.4

  Mantle’s request paled in comparison to Joe DiMaggio’s notorious ultimatums. In 1949, after leading the league in home runs and RBIs, Joe demanded that he become the first $100,000 man in baseball. Weiss caved. Yet he didn’t believe that Mantle deserved anywhere near what the Yankee Clipper commanded. Increasing Mickey’s salary carried great risk, given his lapses in judgment off the field, Weiss calculated. According to Mantle, Weiss slid an envelope across his desk and said, “I wouldn’t want this to get into Merlyn’s hands.”5

  Mickey opened the envelope. Inside he found damaging reports from private investigators documenting his late-night affairs. Weiss didn’t need to say a word. Mantle understood the silent language of blackmail. If he didn’t play by the club’s rules, Weiss threatened, he would find himself playing for another team. Fuming, Mickey said he would rather quit baseball than let Weiss trade him. Without another word he stormed out of the office.6

  Fortunately for Mickey, Yankees owners Del Webb and Dan Topping intervened. They didn’t want to alienate the best player in the game. Weiss had no choice. He paid the asking price, but Mickey said later he “never forgot” Weiss’s treatment of him. Years later, after a few drinks, Mantle called Weiss the “meanest cocksucker” he had ever known.7

  For a moment Mickey’s secret slept in Weiss’s desk drawer. But Confidential, described by Tom Wolfe as the “most scandalous scandal magazine in the history of the world,” exposed his affair with Holly Brooke. The celebrity gossip rag, then at its peak, reached more than 4.5 million readers—a larger circulation than Time—threatening Mantle’s brand. In an exposé filled with double entendres, Holly revealed how her business deal with Mickey turned into a torrid affair dating back to his rookie season. She wrote, “Some girls have minks, some own diamonds. I had to be different. I own one-fourth of the most gorgeous hunk of man in the major leagues, Mickey Mantle. And there have been times when he was mine—100%.”8

  Mickey wanted to keep his secret from Merlyn. According to Mantle, about a month before spring training began, they traveled with friends Harold and Stella Youngman to Havana, Cuba. During a layover in Montgomery, Alabama, Harold spotted Mickey’s face on the magazine cover at the airport newsstand. He nudged him and asked, “Hey, Mickey, isn’t that your picture?” Mantle panicked, fearing Merlyn would see it too. He and Harold rushed to purchase every copy on display and tossed them into the nearest trashcan. But it was no use. When they returned home from Havana, a stack of issues awaited them at the front door.9

  Mickey was no longer just a famous baseball player; he was a celebrity and, as such, a victim of the new rules of celebrity culture. In the past, cultural critic Neal Gabler noted, “the rich, the powerful, the famous and the privileged had always governed their own images.” Prominent baseball players were protected by the sportswriters who crafted their public personas. Although sports reporters undoubtedly saw Mantle out on the town with Brooke and other women, they were not willing to jeopardize their chummy relationship with the Yankees by commenting on it. But in the 1950s gossip columnists treated everyone as a commodity; the private lives of “personalities”—actors, musicians, and now athletes—became sources of real-life drama that appeared to mimic Hollywood productions. At a time when Americans craved more revealing entertainment, scandal magazines like Confidential wallowed in sensationalism. And after 1956, Mickey Mantle was an ideal subject, not only because he was famous, but because he appeared so innocent and pure.10

  IT WAS AN UNFORGETTABLE night, but when reporters asked the Yankees exactly what happened at the Copacabana in the early hours of May 16, 1957, they learned little. On the eve of Billy Martin’s twenty-ninth birthday, he and five of his teammates—Mickey, Yogi, Whitey Ford, Hank Bauer, and Johnny Kucks—celebrated over dinner at Danny’s Hideaway. Afterward the group enjoyed more drinks and a show featuring Johnnie Ray at the Waldorf-Astoria. Finally, the players and their wives packed into three taxis and headed for the Copacabana, where, according to the nightclub’s motto, “every night was New Year’s eve.”11

  It was about 2:00 a.m. when the taxis reached their destination on East 60th Street near Central Park. Mobsters, celebrities, casting agents, gossip columnists, and athletes made the Copa the “hottest club North of Havana.” The biggest stars of the stage and screen—Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Elizabeth Taylor, Marilyn Monroe, Bette Davis, and many more—could be found there luxuriating in the glow of celebrity. Surrounded by electric blue and pink palm trees, the players told stories and cracked jokes, while Sammy Davis Jr. sang in the background. The Copa staff seated the Yankees players and their wives at a prominent table near the stage, treating them like royalty. “We were the kings and queens of New York,” Carmen Berra beamed.

  Suddenly a loud, drunken group of men celebrating a championship in their local bowling league staggered into the club. From that moment on, there is no consensus on the exact order of events. To be sure, several of the men, who were from the Bronx, began to ride Davis, referring to him as a “jungle bunny” and “little black Sambo.” The Yankees’ Elston Howard had suffered similar indignities in American League ballparks, and Bauer, his roommate, became furious. The players told the men to shut up. Martin, who even sober had a short fuse, insisted that the loudest racists follow him outside for a “talk.”

  Moments after Martin left the table, Mickey told Merlyn that he had to make sure that Billy didn’t get into trouble. “Billy, Billy, Billy!” he shouted, searching for his best friend. At that point several people in the club, including reporters, followed the commotion toward the cloakroom. By that time one of the Bronx men, a delicatessen owner named Ed Jones, was stretched out on the floor with a broken nose, a bruised face, and a large knot on his chin. Mantle was so drunk that he hardly knew what had happened. “A body came flying out and landed at my feet,” he testified about a month later before a grand jury. “At first I thought it was Billy, so I picked him up. But when I saw it wasn’t, I dropped him back down. It looked like Roy Rogers rode through the Copa on Trigger and Trigger kicked the guy in the face.”

  “L’Affaire Copa” received front-page treatment in the New York tabloids. The next morning the Journal-American’s bold headline screamed, “Yanks Star in Copa Brawl.” The Daily Mirror featured a front-page photograph of Ed Jones pointing to a discolored lump on his chin. His brother, Leonard Jones, claimed that Bauer had coldcocked him, though Ed couldn’t recall who threw the knockout punch. “The Bruiser” denied it. He claimed that one of the club’s bouncers hit Jones. Ultimately, conflicting testimony and insufficient evidence allowed Bauer to escape a criminal trial. The “Battle of the Copa,” however, proved consequential to the future of the team.12

  The “Copa Six,” Roger Kahn wrote, had violated the Yankees’ corporate code of personnel conduct: “Shun scandal. Keep your name out of the gossip columns. Be courteous, but reserved. Act kindly toward small boys and puppies. Keep your public drinking to a minimum. Remember your dignity. Treat your superiors with a touch of reverence. Watch your romantic life; girls have a place, but don’t forget to keep them in it.” Kahn and the New York beat writers knew that Mantle, Martin, and Ford regularly broke these sacred rules—but that only one of them would pay for it.13

  Before the season began George Weiss reminded Martin of the Yankee code. Weiss had of course read about him in the tabloids and disapproved of Martin’s carousing. Pictures of him with his arm around chorus girls and Broadway dancers conveyed the wrong message in th
e general manager’s view. A Yankee should be a button-down family man, but Martin, a divorced father, flaunted his bachelor lifestyle. Weiss had warned him that if he caused any more trouble, if he did anything that embarrassed the club, he would be gone.14

  The Copa incident disturbed Weiss. He sensed a deeper problem, one that threatened the Yankee franchise and possibly professional baseball. He understood the value of an unblemished Mickey Mantle. He pored over daily gate receipts, fully aware that Mantle’s spectacular performance in 1956 added significantly to the revenues of the Yankees and every American League team. His soaring home runs were as much a part of the New York skyline as the Empire State Building.

  Weiss also knew that Mantle was immature and easily influenced by others—especially Martin. He didn’t care who threw the punch that floored Ed Jones. It was enough that Martin was there, that he had shot off his mouth and was certainly willing to slug someone. More importantly, when Martin left the table—Billy later gave a benign reason for that decision—Mickey followed, ready for whatever came next.

  The event prompted Weiss to do a little baseball math. Martin was expendable. The Yankees already had the squeaky-clean Bobby Richardson, a talented twenty-one-year-old, who could take his place at second. Mantle, however, was irreplaceable. He was the franchise’s crown jewel.

  Soon the press was reporting that Weiss had tried to trade Martin to the Washington Senators, but the deal had fallen through. Billy knew his days with the Yankees were over. Yet Weiss never even considered trading Mantle’s other mischievous partner, Whitey Ford. The son of a bartender, Ford was known as a “playboy” who never skipped a party, but somehow he was able to avoid the same notoriety as Martin. Of course, the main difference between him and Martin was that he was the best starting pitcher in the American League, while Billy was an average player.15

  Weiss’s bottom line: Billy had to go. In Kansas City, on June 15, 1957, the last day of the trading period, Casey Stengel delivered the news. “You’re gone,” he told Martin. One hour and nine minutes before the trade deadline, Weiss dumped Martin, as part of a trade involving multiple players, on the woeful Kansas City Athletics.

  The careers of the M&M boys were far from over, but this moment brought a sense of finality, signaling the end of an era. They all knew that this was it. Mickey, Whitey, and Billy spent their last night together as teammates, Three Musketeers drinking into the early morning, raising their glasses for one last toast.

  FOR MICKEY LIFE IN professional baseball would never be as good again. Emotionally, Martin was irreplaceable. “It’s like losing a brother,” he said. Mantle went on to enjoy a few more spectacular seasons, winning the MVP Award in 1957 and 1962. In 1961, he again chased Babe Ruth’s single-season home run record, though he fell short after being sidelined with an abscess in his hip joint. Instead he watched teammate Roger Maris break the record that season. New Yorkers rooted hard for Mantle that year; they wanted “a real Yankee” to break the record, not Maris, who came to the team via a trade with the Kansas City Athletics.

  After 1956, though, Mantle struggled to fulfill the unreasonable demands of baseball fans. His fragile body repeatedly betrayed him. He suffered a rosary of injuries—a torn tendon in his right shoulder, a fractured right index finger, a broken bone in his right foot, and assorted pulled and strained muscles. Surgeons repaired his knees and shoulders until there weren’t enough pins to hold his body together. The most remarkable aspect of his career is that it lasted eighteen seasons.16

  Despite persistent injuries, he compiled a Hall of Fame resume. His career numbers tell part of the story: 2,415 hits, 536 home runs, and a .298 batting average. More than those impressive statistics, fans appreciated him for the thrills he delivered year after year. On June 8, 1969, when the Yankees retired his number, seven, a packed Yankee Stadium honored him with a standing ovation. They cheered for what seemed like an hour, growing louder and louder as Mantle waved for them to quiet down. “I always wondered how a man who knew he was going to die could stand here and say he was the luckiest man in the world,” he said of Lou Gehrig. “But now I can understand.”17

  That was how he wanted to be remembered. That was how the Yankee organization wanted him to be remembered.

  But life didn’t follow the script.

  In 1970, he was living in Dallas, far from the New York spotlight. His name had all but disappeared from the sports pages. He socialized mostly with his golfing partners at the local club. “It was like Mickey Mantle had died,” he recalled. Later that year former teammate Jim Bouton resurrected him. In his exposé Ball Four, Bouton shattered Mantle’s heroic image and the country’s faith in the purity of the Great American Game. Grown men who once idolized him learned that many of the baseballs with Mantle’s signature were actually forged by clubhouse attendant Pete Previte. And Bouton revealed what sportswriters concealed during the 1950s: Mickey caroused late into the night, played with hangovers, and peered into hotel room windows, leering at undressed women.18

  Although Bouton’s book chronicled his own experiences during the 1969 season, his portrait of Mantle turned Ball Four into the best-selling sports book of the time. Critics denounced the mediocre pitcher as attention starved, a traitor who wanted to ruin the reputation of America’s pastime and the men who played the game. Commissioner Bowie Kuhn tried to force Bouton into admitting that the book was fiction. His former teammates and other players shunned him for betraying the game’s most treasured, long-standing rule: “What you see here, what you say here, what you do here, let it stay here.”19

  Ball Four marked the beginning of a new era in sports. During the Vietnam War, reporters challenged the authority of American institutions: government, military, church, corporations, and even sports. Fewer sportswriters aimed to write about athletes as heroes in the manner of Red Smith and Jimmy Cannon. Instead, they wanted to be more like Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, investigative journalists puncturing sacred American myths.

  Mickey Mantle became the most prominent victim of the new ambition to reveal the truth. In the process, who he was and what he meant to America in 1956 became lost. When Mantle hung up his spikes, it signaled the end of an era—not just for the Yankees but for baseball as well. The spring of pinstripe legends—Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, Mantle—ran dry. The Yankees anointed Bobby Murcer, a handsome center fielder from Oklahoma, as their next great, but he was no Mickey Mantle. It took a decade for the Yankees to find a player who came close to Mantle as a slugger and a draw, but Reggie Jackson never won over the nation. By that time, too, baseball had been replaced by football, which dominated television as baseball once did the radio. Joe Namath emerged as the face of the new American game. If any athlete replaced Mantle in New York, it was Broadway Joe, as much a product of the 1960s as Mantle was of the 1950s. As the journalist Mary McGrory noted, “Baseball is what we were, football is what we have become.”20

  In 1969, the year Namath led the New York Jets to a stunning victory over the Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III, the Yankees turned Mantle into a monument, a relic of the past. During his retirement ceremony, they honored him with a plaque in center field. Columnist Jim Murray recognized that there would never be another athlete like Mickey Mantle. “He’s the last of the Yankees,” Murray wrote. “He might have been the best of them, considering the night games, the slider, the big parks, the trappers’ mitts, and the fact that he would have been a certified cripple in any other industry. He was rejected four times by the military, afraid he couldn’t keep up with a Fourth of July parade.”21

  “I know one thing,” Murray added, “those monuments in center field are going to be awfully lonely this summer. Their last link to the present is gone.”

  Yet, in the seasons that followed, the cheers for Mantle continued to echo throughout Yankee Stadium. Whenever his name was announced at the Old-Timers’ Day celebrations, fans rose to their feet, honoring the man who was the closest link to Yankee glory of years past. He connected the fans to another age, a
time before players let their hair fall to their shoulders and wore fur coats when they went out on the town. The revelations of his personal troubles, his drinking, carousing, and occasional boorishness, did not diminish his aura. Perhaps his faults made him even more human, strengthening his connection to his legion of admirers. Even younger Yankees fans who never saw him play learned to love him.

  OZZIE SWEET PERFECTLY captured the essence of Mickey Mantle and his times. In the 1950s the photographer became well known for his memorable portraits for the cover of Sport, the first general-interest sports magazine. Featuring profiles of famous athletes written by the best writers of the era, Sport emphasized the stories off the field, making athletes more accessible to readers. As distinctive as the Saturday Evening Post, it published colorful photographs that brought athletes to life. A self-proclaimed “photographic illustrator,” Sweet posed his subjects in revealing close-ups and simulated-action scenes. Using color film, he turned full-page photos of baseball’s biggest stars into posters, perfect for tacking onto bedroom walls.22

  In early April 1957, after spring training ended in St. Petersburg, Florida, Sweet invited Mickey—one of his favorite subjects—along with Billy Martin, Whitey Ford, and Bob Grim for a photo shoot on a fishing boat off the coast of Madeira Beach. Ozzie snapped candid shots of the men, four teammates in their prime, a fraternity of brothers basking in the sunshine without a care in the world. Sweet’s roll of black-and-white film reveals an animated and happy Mantle: reeling in a big catch; recounting a hunting story with an imaginary rifle in his hand; eating a bucket of fried chicken; laughing at Billy, who smiles right back at him. It’s the sweetest moment between the men caught on camera.23

  Another picture, a colorful Rockwellian portrait reminiscent of a Technicolor movie frame, captured the essence of the men and their times. Sweet caught the foursome in the back of the boat: Grim and Ford sitting on the railing, Mickey and Billy lounging in chairs fastened to the deck. Surrounded by the clear emerald-turquoise water, a trail of waves behind them, Grim, wearing a white sleeveless undershirt, his tan arms exposed, turns his head portside, looking into the distance. Dressed in a wrinkled white T-shirt and khaki pants, Ford, the only one looking directly at the camera, eases a broad grin across his face. Turning away from Sweet, Martin and Mantle sit at an angle, holding bottles of Coca-Cola, which many famous ballplayers pedaled as their preferred beverage. Leaning back in his chair, sporting brown pants and a short-sleeve buttoned shirt, Martin casts his eyes downward. Mantle leans forward, dressed in a white golf shirt and blue pants, the sun warming his handsome face.