Rickey & Robinson

by Roger Kahn

  “Who told you about this fucking petition?” Durocher asked Sukeforth.

  “Kirby Higbe, after he had some beers.”

  “Must be another Kirby Higbe,” Durocher said. “Our guy comes from South Carolina. They don’t care for colored people down there.”

  “It is our Hig,” Sukeforth said. “He told me when his pitching was going badly, the Dodger organization took a chance on his arm and let him restart his career. Hig says he owes the Dodgers. He’s afraid the petition will tear the team apart.”

  “This is big, Sukey,” Durocher said. “Let me sleep on it a while.”

  But Durocher could not fall asleep on his army cot in the faraway Panama Canal Zone. At one o’clock in the morning Durocher decided that there was no reason why he should sleep. No reason at all. Get the hell up!

  Durocher roused his coaches and told them to bring all the players into a big empty kitchen behind an army mess. The team assembled in night clothing and underwear. “Boys,” Durocher began in a loud bray that rattled spinal disks. “I hear some of you don’t want to play with Robinson. Some of you have drawn up a petition.”

  The players sat on chopping blocks and leaned against cold stoves. Durocher, possessed of a phenomenal, if selective, memory, told me he could recall his exact words.

  “Well, boys, you know what you can use that petition for?

  “Yeah, you know.

  “You’re not that fucking dumb.

  “Take the petition and, you know, wipe your ass.

  “I’m the manager and paid to win and I’d play an elephant if he could win for me and this fellow Robinson is no elephant. You can’t throw him out on the bases and you can’t get him out at the plate. This fellow is a great player. He’s gonna win pennants. He’s gonna put money in your pockets and mine.

  “And here’s something else. He’s only the first, boys, only the first. There’s many more colored ballplayers coming right behind him and they’re hungry, boys. They’re scratching and diving.

  “Unless you wake up, these colored ballplayers are gonna run you right out of the park.

  “I don’t want to see your petition. I don’t want to hear anything about it.

  “The meeting is over. Go back to bed.”

  Did any manager ever have a finer moment?

  Early the next day Durocher placed a phone call to Rickey, who was briefly back in his Brooklyn office. “I was appalled by what I heard but I entirely endorsed Durocher’s statements, if not his vocabulary,” Rickey told me. “I believe, I have always believed, that a little show of force at the right time is necessary when there is a deliberate violation of the law and the law here was the fair employment act. I knew that a reasonable show of force was now the best way to control this thing. When a man is involved in an overt act of violence or a destruction of someone else’s rights, then that is no time to conduct an experiment in education or persuasion.”

  After the Panama tour, Rickey summoned a number of players into his office, one by one. “I talked to them singly,” he told me. “I wanted to rob them of safety in numbers. I read each of them the riot act. Bobby Bragan argued with me hardest. I reminded him that we had other catchers and that he was not indispensable. An intelligent man, but he remained obdurate. I thought that his bigotry might be changed by proximity to Robinson, as given time it was. I did not then cut him from the squad.

  “Hugh Casey, our best relief pitcher, was indispensable but curiously insecure for a great competitor. When I told him he might end up relieving in the minor leagues, he simply wilted. I told Cookie Lavagetto, a popular veteran, that frankly I was ashamed of him. Lavagetto hung his head.”

  “What did you tell Furillo?” I asked.

  “Nothing. I did not bother to speak to him at all. I regarded Furillo as a man in whom talk could arise no moral dilemma because he had no basic moral compass of his own. I would almost have wagered that later Furillo would argue as rabidly in Robinson’s behalf as he was arguing against Robinson in those days.”

  During the early 1950s, when I started covering the Dodgers on a daily basis, Furillo warmed up before each game by playing catch with a teammate of his choice, the great receiver from the Negro Leagues, Roy Campanella. And of course he had a moral compass. “I was fucking wrong five years ago,” he told me. “That’s why right now I play catch with Campy every day.”

  Whether Bobby Bragan actually did change remains questionable. In 1983, when I bought the Class A Utica Blue Sox, Bragan, then president of the Texas League, telephoned to wish me well. “Most people lose money in the minors,” he said, “but you don’t have to worry about that.” Then, referring to my partially Jewish heritage, he went on, “Your kind always makes money!”

  Bragan remained a Dodger into the season of 1948. Neither Rickey’s persuasive power nor playing alongside Jackie Robinson weaned this smart and essentially likeable man away from his entrenched stereotyping of others.

  Utica won the 1983 pennant in the New York–Penn League. Keeping the team in business for a single season cost me $17,000. Despite being whatever “kind” I may be, that was a net loss. The local utility, a voracious company called Niagara Mohawk Power, refused to supply electricity for the ballpark lights until I had written a personal check for $7,500 as a deposit. Clubhouse lights? That would be an upfront $1,000 more. “We ought to socialize you bastards,” I said genially to a bloodless clerk, who did not answer.

  In retrospect destroying the racist petition was an unalloyed triumph for that decidedly odd couple, Branch Rickey, the eloquent teetotaler, and Leo Durocher, baseball’s Loud Lip. But as Scott Fitzgerald famously reminded Ring Lardner, life is larger than a diamond. Off the field Durocher, a long-term Rickey reclamation project, was running with a dangerous crowd, on Broadway and in Hollywood. The hallmarks of Leo’s bicoastal friends were a passion for gambling and rampant lust, both of which would have a significant impact on Durocher’s managerial career and Rickey’s noble experiment. Here are some leading characters in Le Gang Durocher:

  George Raft, movie tough guy, and offscreen friend of the notorious gangster Owney Madden. Raft was a heavy baseball bettor and a card shark. He sometimes organized crooked dice games. He always brought the dice. Married at the age of 22 in a Roman Catholic ceremony, Raft never was able to obtain a divorce from Grace Mulrooney. Offscreen the movie tough could be warm and attentive and he was a ballroom dancer almost in a class with Fred Astaire. Estranged from Grace for more than 45 years, Raft plunged into affairs with Betty Grable, Marlene Dietrich, Mae West and Norma Shearer. “I just don’t like to sleep alone,” he said. During the 1940s, Raft let Durocher share his Hollywood mansion in the winter months and join his crap games and frolics along with his friends, his women and his fellow desperados.

  Max “Memphis” Engleberg, a big-time bookmaker, who set the odds and point spreads that his colleagues used to run their gambling businesses. As detectives later established, the point spreads Engleberg created were a key to prodigious betting on the college basketball doubleheaders that regularly sold out Madison Square Garden. For at least 10 years, games involving City College, St. John’s, NYU, Kentucky and Bradley Tech, among others, routinely were fixed. Hard-eyed gamblers ordered the fixes. Fresh-faced college athletes carried them out.

  Conrad “Connie” Immerman. During Havana’s swinging pre-Castro days he ran the casino at the elegant Hotel Nacional. Gambling was legal then, prostitution flourished and on almost every corner in Havana you found all-night shops selling coffee and condoms.

  “Bugsy” Siegel, born Benjamin Siegelbaum, gently played by Warren Beatty in a popular 1991 movie but in reality a savage hoodlum. Following a mob dispute Siegel was shot to death in June 1947.

  Joe Adonis, born Giuseppe Antonio Doto, a Mafia thug. Adonis was deported to his native Italy in 1956. During an interrogation by Italian police he suffered a fatal heart attack.

  The list of additional hoods ran very long. “Of course Leo ran with a rat pack,” someone has said. �
��Only this one had real rats.”

  As commissioner, Landis kept files on Durocher, but he was most active in 1943 considering the now forgotten case of a lumber millionaire named William D. Cox, principal owner of the Phillies, who stood accused of betting on ballgames. He bet on the Phillies, not against them, but any baseball gambling by an owner violated the game’s prime directive: Do not bet! Landis found the charges valid and ruled sternly on Cox: “You are hereby declared ineligible to hold any office or employment with the Philadelphia National League Club, or any club or league party to the Major-Minor Agreement.” (This was decidedly more draconian than commissioner Allan “Bud” Selig’s 2011 action deposing Fastbuck Frank McCourt as CEO of the Dodgers. The charge against Frankie Fastbuck was not gambling, but overall fiscal irresponsibility, spelled greed, which contributed to his mismanagement of what had been a gorgeous ballpark at the center of what was once a golden franchise. Unlike McCourt, Cox, a Yale graduate, went quietly. After no more than token resistance, he broadcast a farewell on a popular New York radio station, WOR. Cox concluded, “Good luck and goodbye to everyone in baseball.”)

  Durocher, who sprang from a pool-hall boyhood in Springfield, Massachusetts, became a gambling man in the rousing world beyond the old neighborhood pool halls. He loved cards, dice and betting at the racetrack. He publicly praised Memphis Engleberg as “the best horse race handicapper I’ve ever met.” As we’ve seen, Landis’s office was created in the wake of the Black Sox scandal, and the judge was hypersensitive on issues of gambling, legal or otherwise. He maintained that he would allow no one with racetrack connections to buy a major-league team. “My constant battle,” he said, “is to keep baseball clean and away from the gamblers.”

  But Landis did make exceptions. Rogers Hornsby, perhaps the greatest right-handed hitter in the annals, was never far from a copy of the Daily Racing Form. Landis looked away. He regarded Durocher as a talented, truant schoolboy who could well be reformed. Landis summoned Durocher to his Chicago office more than once and cautioned him, but in a fatherly way. According to Durocher, Landis said, “Son, I don’t want you hurting yourself by running with the wrong crowd and getting into trouble.”

  Durocher was bald-headed, brash and loud, and his vocabulary often exploded with obscenity. But Leo the Lip also could exude cloud banks of charm. Living with George Raft opened his way to the boudoirs of movie actresses, and Durocher energetically put his charm to work.

  Someone has described Laraine Day as a B-plus movie star. She was better than those cute anonymous female leads in B movie westerns, but she was never on a par with such major performers as Joan Crawford or Bette Davis. Day starred in the Hitchcock thriller Foreign Correspondent and played Cary Grant’s love interest in Mr. Lucky, but her signature role was as prim, pretty nurse Mary Lamont, whom she played in seven Dr. Kildare films.

  She was born La Raine Johnson into a prosperous, devoutly Mormon family. Her great-grandfather, three of his six wives and a few dozen of his 52 children were early California settlers in the town of San Bernardino. (The family history of indiscriminate polygamy never broke into Laraine’s MGM press releases.)

  She was an established actress in 1942 when she married one Ray Hendricks, a former Air Force flight instructor who became manager of the Montebello Airport, eight miles east of downtown Los Angeles. In a few years of marriage, Laraine claimed, Hendricks evolved from a social drinker into a confirmed alcoholic. This rendered him virtually impotent just as Laraine was blossoming.

  On a slow train through Texas during spring training 1954, Durocher recounted an ensuing event. He and Laraine began to hold secret meetings after the 1946 season, while Durocher also struck up a seeming friendship with Laraine’s husband, Ray. One night the three began to watch one of Laraine’s movies in the screening room of the large home she had purchased in the West Hollywood hills. Hendricks soon drank himself to sleep. Leo and Laraine embraced and proceeded to have at it full blast on a piano bench. Suddenly the reel of film snapped in the projector and began flapping loudly. The noise woke Hendricks. He turned on the lights. On the piano bench Laraine and Leo were heaving in each other’s arms.

  Durocher recovered first and pulled up his pants. “I had to be ready,” he told me. “The guy might have charged.” Laraine stood up and began to speak in breathless tones. “I love Leo,” she said. “He loves me. We want to be married.”

  At the subsequent divorce trial Hendricks testified, “The rapidity and shock of these events completely humiliated and overwhelmed me. In my opinion Leo Durocher is not a fit person for Laraine to associate with. She’s only a young girl, 26 years old. Durocher is more than twice her age. [Actually Leo was 41.] He is guilty of dishonorable and ungentlemanly conduct. He clandestinely pursued the love of my wife under my very roof, while pretending to be a family friend.” The Los Angeles Herald Examiner summed up that day in court with a catchy headline: “Durocher Branded Love Thief.”

  A California judge named George A. Dockweiler granted Laraine the divorce she wanted on January 20, 1947, with the stipulation that she could not marry again in California for a full year. A day later in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, Laraine and Leo married. Some said the residency requirement for marriage in Juarez was three minutes.

  Furious, Dockweiler ordered Laraine to show cause why her divorce should not be set aside. Durocher, never shy, telephoned Dockweiler to ask if Laraine could return to California without being hauled into court. She could, the judge ruled, as long as she and Leo did not live together. Laraine said through tears, “Doesn’t the judge care about my happiness?” Then she moved into her mother’s home in Santa Monica. Leo then leased a suite in the Miramar Hotel, which was located in, of all places, Santa Monica.

  As Durocher had pounced on Laraine, Life magazine pounced on the story. The publication ran a lively text and photo essay under the headline: THE CASE OF LEO AND LARAINE; BASEBALL’S LOUDMOUTH AND HOLLYWOOD’S NICE GIRL MAY BE PUT OUT AT HOME.

  Life, primarily a picture magazine, ran strong shots of Durocher arguing with umpires. Another section, called “Leo and the Ladies,” featured three photographs of Durocher. In one he was sunning himself with a leggy Copacabana chorus girl named Edna Ryan. In another he was hugging the blonde movie star Betty Hutton. In the third he was being kissed by the dark-haired beauty Linda Darnell. That week a downtown Brooklyn movie theater showing Mr. Lucky posted an arresting message on its marquee: Starring Cary Grant and Mrs. Leo Durocher.

  Branch Rickey, the epitome of monogamy, told the newspapermen that he would have no comment.

  Baseball people had behaved scandalously before. Babe Ruth often asked his teammate Joe Dugan to go through his fan mail. “Keep the stuff with checks and from broads,” Ruth would say in his customary bellow. “Dump the rest.” Joe DiMaggio was well known as a serial seducer of chorus girls. But in the days of Ruth and later DiMaggio, journalists did not write such stuff. What was unique about the Follies Durocher was not the sex but the press coverage of the sex. It never stopped.

  A popular promotion throughout the major leagues brought thousands of youngsters into the ballpark without charge on slow weekday afternoons. The idea was to build a future fan base. The Dodger version was a heavily promoted venture called the Knothole Gang, from distant days when children watched ballgames free through the knotholes of wooden outfield fences. The leading participant in the Dodger Knothole Gang was the Brooklyn Catholic Youth Organization, 50,000 boys strong and directed by a zealous priest named Vincent J. Powell.

  Powell gained an audience with Rickey and said that Durocher was a bad example for Catholic youth and indeed for youngsters of all faiths.

  “Doesn’t your church,” Rickey said, “still dispense mercy and forgiveness?”

  Whoops. Wrong response. Powell had not traveled to the Dodger offices to discuss comparative religion with a Methodist. In those days the Catholic Church in New York City had so much general influence that it was colloquially known as the Powerhouse. Father Powell
was about to turn on the power, which came with a mighty surge. If the Dodgers did not replace Durocher as manager, Powell said, he would have no choice but to withdraw the CYO from the Dodger Knothole Gang. He then suggested that an overall Catholic boycott of Dodger games could be in the works. More than 750,000 Roman Catholics lived in the borough of Brooklyn.

  All this was happening within two months of Rickey’s planned promotion of Jackie Robinson to the Dodgers. Rickey had long since decided that Durocher, who was completely devoid of racial prejudice, would be the ideal manager for modern baseball’s first integrated team. Under pressure in his office, he made a quick choice between the integrator and the priest. But controlling himself, Rickey quietly told Powell that he took the priest’s remarks seriously and would discuss them as soon as possible with the team’s board of directors. Shortly after Powell departed, Rickey summoned the club lawyer, Walter O’Malley, an Irish Catholic who had major connections within the Brooklyn diocese.

  Two versions describe what followed. William Shea, the real estate lawyer for whom the Mets’ former stadium was named, told me over dinner at Gage and Tollner, a gaslit restaurant on Fulton Street in Brooklyn, that the problem came down to this: “Walter O’Malley was one lousy lawyer.”

  “How can that be, Bill?” I said. “O’Malley has made more money out of baseball than anyone in history.”

  “That’s right,” Shea said, “but he was one lousy lawyer. O’Malley was the most brilliant businessman I’ve ever met, but we’re talking law here, aren’t we?