The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood by Jane Leavy

Author:Jane Leavy
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Baseball players, Sports & Recreation, General, United States, Baseball, Biography & Autobiography, Sports, Biography, History
ISBN: 9780060883522
Publisher: Harper
Published: 2010-03-24T05:00:00+00:00

Mantle Finally Meeting Destiny. Mickey Taking Charge of Yanks with Stengel Gone—the Boston Globe

On May 2, he hit a tenth-inning grand slam to beat Camilo Pascual in Minnesota. “Never felt better in my life,” he said. Two days later, he hit his ninth home run and embarked on a 16-game hitting streak. “Just like 1956,” he observed.

Maris was batting .200.

4.

All baseball players lead bifurcated lives—home and away, season and off-season. The sport’s immutable schedule causes stress fractures in even the strongest marriages. Tom Tresh, who made his major league debut in 1961, once calculated that he saw his family perhaps six weeks between February and September. “I was an absentee father,” said former Detroit Tiger Denny McLain. “Mickey was an absentee father. That’s what we did for a goddamned living.”

Mrs. Mickey Mantle, envied for the presumed benefits of being married to a baseball demigod, was often miserable. Her life was equal parts glamour and loneliness, comfort and emotional deprivation.

The Yankee wives, as they are collectively known, mostly to team broadcasters, were an entity in name only. Yes, there were bus rides through the city streets at World Series time, when New York’s finest escorted them from one borough to the next, sirens wailing, half of them pregnant and counting their blessings that they didn’t deliver on the Brooklyn Bridge. Yes, there were picnics and barbecues and birthday parties, but the quotidian life was one of isolation. “We did things as wives together very seldom because we all had children,” said Lucille McDougald. “We would get together maybe once a season when they were on a long road trip. But there was not a whole lot of socializing going on.”

Like many former tenants of the Concourse Plaza Hotel, the Mantles moved across the Hudson River to the New Jersey suburbs when they had the means to do so and the families to house. Merlyn hated the rentals, especially the one with a painting of a couple in flagrante delicto in the master bedroom, and cat poop behind the furniture. “My sons got boils,” she told me. “They were sick all summer.”

By 1961, she had four boys under the age of ten—not including her husband—and she was overmatched. “When we all moved over to New Jersey, Merlyn just stayed with the kids,” Lucille McDougald said. “She rarely came to the ballpark. She more or less faded into the background.”

The Mantles, Berras, and McDougalds occasionally shared a baby-sitter named Martha Helen Kostyra, a young grammar school student who was embarking on a career of entrepreneurial domesticity by organizing birthday parties for neighborhood kids. “They behaved for Martha,” declared the empress of style herself, Martha Stewart. (Yogi and Carmen didn’t remember her.)

Mantle didn’t behave and Merlyn absorbed the worst of it. Back in Oklahoma, before the move to Dallas, she had the help and support of her sister and her parents. They could do only so much. One particularly liquid night in the winter of 1954, after Mantle had been publicly upbraided by Stengel,

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