Rickey & Robinson (17 page)

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?

“Of course he lost when he tried to plead Durocher’s case with that priest. He wasn’t trying to embarrass Rickey. He just lost.

“I wouldn’t have let O’Malley plead a parking ticket for me.”

By far the best of recent Dodger books is Bob McGee’s affectionate biography of Ebbets Field,
The Greatest Ballpark Ever
. McGee writes, “It was inconceivable that Walter O’Malley’s influence within the Church could not defuse the [Durocher] situation. But the fact was O’Malley didn’t much care for Rickey or Durocher and enjoyed their difficulty.” McGee then cites a voluble Dodger executive named Harold Parrott. “One word from O’Malley and the anti-Leo priests would have piped down.

“But the Big Oom never gave the word.

“Rickey had reason to wonder who had put the churchmen up to this. The Catholics never boycotted Hitler or Mussolini the way they went after Leo Durocher.”

I am a little regretful that in all of my conversations with Walter O’Malley, stretching across 35 years, I never asked him about Durocher and the Roman Catholic Church. As I say, a little regretful, but no more than that. Walter was an outstanding fabulist. Had I asked, there is no reason to think he would have responded with the truth.

The continuing Catholic threats so alarmed Rickey that he dispatched his personal assistant, Arthur Mann, to the offices of the new commissioner, Happy Chandler, in Cincinnati. Mann was to “air out” the Durocher situation. Chandler insisted that he was already on top of the matter because had been reading Judge Landis’s Durocher file. “There are certain people,” Chandler said, “that Leo simply has to stop seeing.” He named Raft and Bugsy Siegel and Joe Adonis. Mann was surprised Chandler had so much information, but he agreed and said he spoke for Rickey, whose opposition to gambling was resolute.

A few weeks later Chandler ordered Durocher to meet him at the Claremont Country Club in Oakland, California. Leo later said, “Happy had always been a good friend. I used to see him with fast company at the Stork Club in New York. Always gave me a big hello and that hamfat drawl. ‘Ah loves baseball!’” At the Claremont, Chandler bought lunch and then produced a sheet of paper with a list of now familiar names. Durocher was surprised. He had thought, he told me, Chandler wanted to talk about the Laraine Day affair. But as always Durocher responded quickly to an unexpected situation.

Bugsy Siegel? “I was introduced to him once in a barber shop.”

Joe Adonis? “Never even met him, but he would say hello to me at the ballpark. I would nod. I told Chandler, Okay, I’ll stop nodding.”

Memphis Engleberg? “Sure, he was a friend. Whenever we went to the racetrack, he’d mark my card. But I sure as hell can’t tell you whether he ever bet on baseball. I know I never did.”

Connie Immerman? “If the casino he runs in Havana is controlled by criminals, hell, that’s news to me. I thought it was controlled by Cubans.”

George Raft? “We’ve hung around together, but if you tell me I can’t stay at his house anymore, and I gotta turn down his invitations, well, you’re the commissioner. I’ll feel like a louse, but I’ll do it.”

The claims of innocence sound a touch belligerent. Durocher was endlessly a belligerent character. But the Durocher gambling issue of
the mid-1940s ran deeper than questionable associations. Bill Veeck, the brilliant and inventive executive who variously owned the Cleveland Indians, the St. Louis Browns and the Chicago White Sox, always had a fondness for gangsters. He explained this to me one day: “When my daddy was on his death bed he said all he wanted on earth was a final glass of Napoleon brandy. This was during Prohibition time. You couldn’t just go out and buy the stuff. So I went down to Al Capone’s headquarters at the old Lexington Hotel and explained the situation. Capone knew about my daddy. My daddy was president of the Cubs. Al said, sure kid, and gave me a bottle of the best Napoleon brandy in his stock. That made my daddy’s final wish come true. Ever since I’ve been a little soft on hoodlums.”

When Veeck took over the Cleveland Indians in 1946, the
Plain Dealer
was calling a swaggering local named Alex “Shondor” Birns
“
the city’s No. 1 racketeer.” Birns supposedly ran Cleveland’s numbers game and was also operating a restaurant, the Alhambra Lounge on Euclid Avenue, “that was considered the in place to go. Famous persons [including Bill Veeck] were frequent customers.