by Roger Kahn
Although he pretends to be pure Brooklyn Celt, O’Malley is the offspring of a German-Irish marriage, who grew up at Culver Military Academy, the University of Pennsylvania and Fordham Law School in the Bronx. In the first trough of the Depression, he scratched out a living servicing bankrupts.
Our lives touched after O’Malley had re-entered the middle class and moved into a private home five blocks from the family apartment at 907 St. Marks Place. I had been enrolled in a small grade school called (for the creator of the first kindergarten) Froebel Academy, and housed at the corner of Brooklyn and Prospect avenues in a building once occupied by Charles Evans Hughes. Names such as Kahn and O’Malley appeared rarely in this Protestant bastion where, during the 1936 Roosevelt landslide, my class supported Alf Landon, by nine to one. But rejecting the clichés of a Roman Catholic upbringing, O’Malley sent his daughter, Terry, to Froebel. Presently, with each man pursuing an area of interest, my father was coaching Froebel sports and Walter O’Malley had become a Froebel trustee.
After my first Herald Tribune stories in 1952, O’Malley said what pleased him was that they were the work of a Froebel boy. I mouthed thanks, a mute, inglorious Robinson, wishing people would stop calling me “boy.” O’Malley’s style was regal, but he was accessible and responsive to questions. Later I composed an enthusiastic feature about him for the Tribune Sunday Magazine.
Disenchantment struck after my story about the Gilliam affair. The phrase I had heard, “How would you like a nigger to take your job?” was, O’Malley insisted, the same as “another Jewish judge,” cacophony piped by unchosen lawyers in courthouse smoke rooms. “It’s rude, but doesn’t mean much,” O’Malley said, “and I’m surprised that you were taken in.”
My defense—“I’d write ‘another Jewish judge,’ too”—drew a wintry response. “A Froebel boy should know how to evaluate things realistically,” O’Malley said, and “Froebel boy” had never sounded so pejorative.
Patches of geniality survived a hardening relationship. O’Malley believed that the first function of the press was to praise, and as his fortune grew, pettiness invaded his style. At one corner of the Ebbets Field press box, a phone was tied into the switchboard. Sportswriters could make local calls without charge, a courtesy that O’Malley ended in 1953, by substituting a pay phone. Subsequently, he complained about “freeloading writers,” and ball players who were “money-hungry.”
But he understood the New York press better than Rickey had. He knew whom to flatter, whom to cajole, whom to browbeat. He discussed stocks with one writer, baseball broadcasting with another and politics with a third. He possessed the high skill of talking into another man’s interest and making that interest appear to be his own. Many baseball writers took him for a warm friend, without recognizing that, as with an under-boiled potato, O’Malley’s warmth was mostly external.
The shock was all the stronger when he led the Dodgers out of Brooklyn and left some journalists to cover golf matches contested by wiry women. Hypocrisy rose from cry to clamor. “For ten years he told us he was a fan. Then he pulls out for money.”
It amazes me to this day that once I stood in the ranks of journalists who, in the most furious words they could summon, indicted a capitalist for being motivated by a passion for greater profits.
The Dodgers prospered in Southern California. After 1958 in which the bones of the team—Hodges hustling in the same infield with Dick Gray, Snider playing outfield beside Gino Cimoli—finished seventh, the Los Angeles Dodgers rebounded to a pennant and world championship. It had taken Brooklyn seventy-five years to win a World Series; Los Angeles won it in Year Two.
World Series attendance exceeded ninety thousand each afternoon in the Los Angeles Coliseum, but O’Malley’s odd frugality persisted. He insisted on closing the so-called press room, a hotel banquet hall where journalists and baseball men eat and drink without charge, at 10P.M. (Bill Veeck, whose White Sox played docile opposition to the Dodgers, responded by keeping the Chicago press room open twenty-four hours a day. “You can have Scotch for breakfast,” Veeck cried, and many did.)
Buzzy Bavasi built the Western Dodgers. The old sluggers yielded to a club of pitchers, Koufax and Drysdale and fast feathery batsmen like Maury Wills. Including 1959, they won three World Series in a decade. The Hollywood community embraced them, and playing at handsome new Dodger Stadium, they drew 2,755,184 customers in 1962, by far the largest total in the history of baseball to that time.
Newspaper accounts described Walter O’Malley entertaining governors, dominating baseball meetings, trudging through East African safaris, a happy man. Then, when the National League expanded to twelve teams in 1969, Bavasi assumed the presidency of the San Diego Padres. Now at length the men who directed the team were co-equals, and after my voyages with Robinson and Cox, Labine and Roe were done, I boarded a plane to California to meet both again. He would book me into the Statler Hilton in downtown Los Angeles, O’Malley said. It was a good functional hotel. “Why not sleep at my place?” said Bavasi. He lived on a mountaintop in La Jolla. “Come over and we can watch the whales migrating in the Pacific.”
Beneath the head of a sable antelope who looked wounded, Walter O’Malley smiled and said that only half the lies the Irish tell are true. At almost seventy, he appeared as he had at sixty and fifty: round face, round spectacles, bouncy jowls and a voice sounding a pure Tammany basso. Beyond a window wall, Dodger Stadium spread in what Red Smith has called the green and brown and white geometry of the diamond. “I’m proud of this park,” O’Malley announced. “If someone tried to give it to the government, I’d fight. I like things the way they are, private enterprise. I don’t like rebelling students. I’m a Tory. An O’Malley a Tory? Why they’d string me up in County Mayo. But Tory is what I am.”
Despite the girth, no sense of jolliness flows from the man. The chuckles seem a camouflage for growls. Sidney Greenstreet conveyed such things in the movies of the 1940s.
“Have you heard,” O’Malley said, “that anyone mentioning Rickey after he left our office was fined a dollar? I respected Rickey but knew him for what he was. Not quite the idealist some would have him.
“Rickey’s Brooklyn contract called for salary plus a percentage of the take, and during World War II the take fell off. It was then Rickey mentioned signing a Negro. He had a fiscal interest.
“Rickey suggested an infielder Leo Durocher said could make any major league club. We anticipated opposition within baseball and they asked if I would fly to Havana. The player’s name was Silvio Garcia. Third base. I flew in a little DC-3 over the Havana waterfront covered with tar, from American tankers that German submarines had sunk. Garcia had personal problems. Besides, he was in the Cuban Army, a conscript. I advised the directors that the Brooklyn club would not do well to hire someone out of the Cuban Army to replace an American boy who had gone to war.
“This episode opened the door. It gave Rickey complete authority to find his own Negro and he found Robinson.
“Rickey played professionally, but I came into baseball in an unusual way,” O’Malley said. “I never practiced law in Brooklyn. I worked in the Lincoln Building, on Forty-second Street in Manhattan. But I lived in Brooklyn and I needed clients and one season during the 1930s I bought a box to take prospective clients to Ebbets Field. Everyone said I was crazy. Yankee Stadium was the place. But I could get a good location in Brooklyn. That began it.
“Now I was doing legal work for the Brooklyn Trust Company, a bank owed a lot of money by the club. It was possible the Brooklyn franchise might go under, but George McLaughlin, the president of the bank, was a tremendous fan. He kept the club afloat. He was under pressure from the superintendent of banks because he had carried the Dodgers’ loan too long.
“Things got better with Larry MacPhail, but there was still this loan. Wendell Willkie became club lawyer in 1941, and when Willkie resigned, McLaughlin assigned me as club lawyer.
“Do you know when Brooklyn baseball reached its he
ight? Just before the television era. We had a talented broadcaster, Red Barber, good lights, then Robinson, and we drew 1.8 million fans into a bandbox ten years after the club darn near went bankrupt.
“Three of us were the quickest to recognize the wisdom of acquiring stock: Branch Rickey, John Smith, from the Pfizer chemical company, and myself. By the late 1940s we agreed not to sell stock to an outsider without first offering it to ourselves. Then Smith was taken terminally ill. Lung cancer.
“One day I learned Rickey had been talking to Joseph Kennedy, the Ambassador.
“I said to Rickey, ‘What’s going on?’
“ ‘Well, with John Smith dead, I feel it’s time to sell. I told Mr. Kennedy you might disagree, but if he acquired my stock and Mrs. Smith’s, he’d have control. He’s got this son, John, who is brilliant in politics but has physical problems. Mr. Kennedy thinks running the Dodgers could be the greatest outlet in the world for John.’
“It might have been Jack Kennedy, president of the Dodgers, but Joe rejected the deal when he found he’d face an unhappy minority stockholder in myself. He didn’t buy, but if he had, Jack Kennedy could be in this chair and alive today.
“Next Rickey negotiated with William Zeckendorf. I invoked the old agreement, and whatever Rickey and Zeckendorf were planning, I got the stock. The price seemed high. The total was two million dollars.
“In my first year as president, Bobby Thomson hit his home run. I attended a banquet at the St. George Hotel, and in the elevator this night was Thomson. He got out on one floor and someone said, ‘Hey, you know what that guy cost me? Twenty-five bucks.’ The elevator boy pointed to me. ‘You know what it cost him? A quarter million.’
“Well, then we started winning, but we had to keep on winning and that was expensive. After the Braves moved to Milwaukee I saw some developments you may remember.”
Mentioning Milwaukee loosed currents of recollection. The 1953 Braves, an ordinary team with Andy Pafko playing left, sold out night after night. O’Malley flew into Billy Mitchell Field whenever the Dodgers played at County Stadium. He likes German food and staged parties at restaurants called Mader’s and Karl Ratsch’s. “There’s a problem,” he said one night across platters of Milwaukee bratwurst. “They’re going to draw a million customers more here than we will back in Brooklyn.”
“Temporary thing.”
“But we can’t afford even a few years of this. The Braves will be able to pay bigger bonuses, run more farm teams and hire the best scouting talent. The history of the Brooklyn club is that fiscally you’re either first or bankrupt. There is no second place.”
He had spoken of a roofed stadium, and for years a model stood in the foyer of the Dodger offices, called “O’Malley’s Pleasure Dome” and drawing laughter. Then in 1955 a bill passed the New York Legislature establishing a Brooklyn Sports Center Authority. O’Malley expected the Authority to condemn a sufficient number of buildings to create a site for the new super ball park.
Currents met at the crossing of Atlantic and Flatbush avenues downtown. Two subway lines join there, alongside the Long Island Railroad Depot, the tallest building in Brooklyn and the Academy of Music. But along Atlantic Avenue wholesale meat markets led toward slums. Condemnation proceedings begun by the Sports Authority could clear land there. O’Malley peddled Ebbets Field for $3 million, sold two minor league parks at $1 million and announced that he was prepared to put the $5 million into a stadium in downtown Brooklyn. Robert Moses, politician, urban planner, said the stadium would create “a China wall of traffic.” Until he measured Moses’ power and found it greater than his, O’Malley says he did not intend to move the Dodgers.
In 1956 he purchased the Los Angeles minor league franchise to “get an anchor windward,” and when the Mayor of Los Angeles appeared in Vero Beach, O’Malley demanded that the city improve Chavez Ravine, the ball-park site; build access roads; offer a ninety-nine-year lease; and grant him half the rights to minerals, a euphemism for oil, under three hundred acres. He won most points and the Dodgers, profitable in Brooklyn, fled to the West and Coronado.
“They called me carpetbagger,” O’Malley said. “One man wrote I left because I believed the colored, Puerto Ricans and Jews were taking over Brooklyn. Lies. Pejorative lies. My son, Peter, came home from Penn and said, ‘Dad, what are we going to do? The things in the papers are terrible.’
“ ‘They are, Peter, but they will pass and the great ball park I’m going to build in California will stand. That will be remembered’ “—he looked through a window wall and beamed—” ‘a monument to the O’Malleys.’”
“Walter,” I said, “putting this aside, what are you worth?”
He blinked, unoffended, and said, “I can’t tell you exactly. There are still some litigations.”
“Well,” I said, remembering the old Froebel Academy Trustee with $15,000 or so in a bank, “suggest a sensible figure I can quote.”
O’Malley brushed his jowls. “A fair figure,” he said, “would be twenty-four million dollars.” He turned and gazed at his California stadium with delight.
Buzzy Bavasi’s window wall commands the sea. Rounder, balder, with sadder eyes than I had known, Bavasi gazed toward the Pacific in winter where young people swam. “The water stays warm and we don’t have much pollution yet,” he said. “This is the highest hill in La Jolla, and the only person with a higher house is Dr. Seuss, who writes the children’s stories. He lives above us and we have to watch it. If a child walks onto his land, Dr. Seuss beats him.”
Bavasi smiled at his own joke. “A nice guy,” he said. “Let’s have some Chivas.”
In the bar off the living room a foot-high Frankenstein monster stood beside a pleasantry of bottles. I pushed a red button on a black base and the monster made a strident sound. His face turned green. Then the sound stopped and the monster’s trousers fell. His undershorts were polka-dotted. Green faded from the face, the monster blushed a brilliant pink.
“I want to ask about a sentence,” Bavasi said. He walked to a high bookcase in the paneled room and took down The French Lieutenant’s Woman. “Look at this,” Bavasi said, showing me the beginning of the book:
An easterly is the most disagreeable wind in Lyme Bay—Lyme Bay being that largest bite from the underside of England’s outstretched southwestern leg—and a person of curiosity could at once have deduced several strong probabilities about the pair who began to walk down the quay at Lyme Regis, the small but ancient eponym of the inbite, one incisively sharp and blustery morning in the late March of 1867.
“Is that a good first sentence?”
“Well, it’s out of Hardy, and the author says so, and you more or less have to see what comes after.”
“But that isn’t the way you wrote or Dick Young.” Bavasi strode about the hard-bought room. “Great team you got to cover. Best team I ever saw. The game, it worries me. Arnold Smith, the man whose money started it down here—I got a cut—they hit him hard. And now we’re trying to sell tickets with the ocean to the west, the desert to the east, Mexico south and two established teams north, including the Dodgers. The game isn’t changing as fast as it should, not getting young people. They should have hired Senator McCarthy as Commissioner. Young people follow him.
“You know all those years in Brooklyn I never got paid. Less than twenty thousand dollars for a couple of seasons and never an offer of a piece of Walter’s action. Even after I put together the L.A. team, Walter didn’t pay me enough.
“After I became an owner we were sitting at a league meeting and Walter said, ‘Well, Buzzy, now that you’ve seen all the books, I guess you think I was cheating you.’ I could have told him something, but I said, ‘No, Walter, I’ve got the World Series rings.’ I was thinking about the old team, Erskine and Campy. I had associations that were priceless. Was I gonna bitch now because he stiffed me?”
Bavasi walked to a telescope. The air curling about the hills was warm and clear. “Look through this,” Bavasi said. At the oth
er end of the telescope, a half dozen miles away, a Little League field stood flat on a hilltop. “I can watch my youngest boy play ball there,” Bavasi said. “That’s something, isn’t it? Drive him to the game. Come home. Have a Scotch. And watch him hit six miles away.”
He talked for a while about the great players with calm professionalism, how Reese endured and Furillo cruised in right center and how he wished he had come really to be Jackie Robinson’s friend. His lips set when he asked about O’Malley. “What did that man tell you he was worth?” Bavasi said.
“About twenty-four million.”
Bavasi looked at me and shook his head and mused, and when he spoke, his voice was charged but soft. “That’s true,” he said. “That’s honest. All Walter left out were three hundred acres of downtown Los Angeles.”
AFTERWORDS ON THE LIFE OF KINGS
In the days after the Dodgers had found their way west and the Brooklyn team withered into retirement, John Lardner introduced me to a wheezing journalist who stood at the long bar of the Artist and Writers Restaurant and tried to talk baseball with us, and drank. He had been blacklisted for his politics, and this cruel deed bowed the man’s spirit and made him afraid. Only the cold fire of Leo Corcoran’s martinis revived a touch of the dashing fellow who had been. Sober, the man spoke banalities. “Say, you guys really like sports, don’t you?” Drunk, he recited a poem he had composed on the creation of the atom bomb. Each stanza drew imagery from a different Shakespearean play. I don’t remember if the poem was good or bad, but the recitation sounded overwhelming.
Throughout the shattering seasons in which he could not work, the journalist studied Shakespeare, and one evening announced that he had grasped the basic universal theme. “What’s going on,” he said, “is war between generations. It’s waged everywhere, if you know how to look. Romeo and Juliet, of course, but why can’t Lady Macbeth kill the king? He looks too much like her father. How does Cassius rouse Brutus? ‘Rome, thou has lost the breed of noble bloods.… There was a Brutus once,’ and so on … King Hamlet’s ghost tortures the young prince. Othello begins with the senator raging at Desdemona’s marriage. And Lear, the greatest play, is the final battle. Generations war in Armageddon and all must die.”
