Stan Musial (36 page)

Born in North Dakota, Dickinson had grown up in Los Angeles, had just appeared in a movie with Frank Sinatra, and ran with him and his Rat Pack friends. Michener described her as “a delightful girl to have aboard an airplane,” and he added, “She had a low raucous laugh that quite demoralized serious discussion.” He marveled at her talent for “looking gorgeous despite the primitive conditions.”

Dickinson declined to go by formalities, even toward the august Schlesinger, whom Michener describes as “not a man who unbends easily.”
Dickinson addressed Schlesinger as “Artie”—probably the only person in history who did.

“
Artie, you were a sensation tonight. Nobody could understand a damned word you said, but you said it so impressively!”

Dickinson was the baseball fan in the group. Like many Angelenos, native or imported, she had been attracted to the sport when the Dodgers came to town in 1958. Suddenly the dulcet voice of Vin Scully could be heard, describing major-league baseball to southern California.

“
We had no ball club and they won their second year here and went to the World Series,” Dickinson said. She remembered going out to dinner one night, seeing a waiter with a plug in his ear, and blurting, “Oh, isn’t that a shame, he’s hard of hearing.” Her companion said, “No, Angie, he’s listening to the ball game.”

Her good friend Johnny Grant, a prominent man about town, escorted her to the Dodgers’ temporary home in the football stadium, the Los Angeles Coliseum. Grant had worked for Gene Autry, the singing movie cowboy who would buy the new Los Angeles Angels in 1961, and Grant knew everybody in baseball.

“Johnny had the great seats in the Coliseum, if there was such a thing,” Dickinson said, recalling how Grant would catch the attention of somebody on the field during batting practice. She once was introduced to Musial from a distance, with Dickinson waving and mouthing an exaggerated “Hi, I think you’re great.”

The next time they met was in Oklahoma. Dickinson had been recruited to the Kennedy campaign by Jeff Chandler, who was suave and handsome and gray-haired, like an earlier George Clooney.

“
Jeff and I had dated, and he called me up and said, ‘How would you like to go out and campaign for the Kennedys?’ I said I’d love it. He said we would leave Monday and go to Tulsa, and travel through seven states. You give your spiel at every stop. I was one of those liberal Democrats and I was single and free. I said, ‘I’m on.’ ”

Now, instead of watching from a seat in the sprawling Coliseum, Dickinson got to meet Musial up close, and vice versa. There were no secrets on the plane.

“These were the days before hot curlers,” Dickinson recalled. “You started from scratch every day. I remember getting on the plane one day,
bandana on, wet curlers underneath, and Stan saying, ‘Oh, do we have to look at you all day?’ ”

Wherever the plane touched down, they would talk up John F. Kennedy to crowds of Republican Protestants. In between, they would pick each other’s brains. Dickinson recalled: “They all want to know, ‘What’s John Wayne like?’ and we all want to know, ‘How do you hit like that?’ ”

Dickinson remembered a Stanley tale about a teammate who was feeling so good one day that he blurted, “I feel like going four for four today.” Musial quickly told him: “Hell, I feel like that every day.”

Dickinson recalled: “Mostly, when we gathered at the end of the day, we let our hair down. You know, after Senator Kennedy became president, he came out to his sister’s house, there were only ten of us, he said, ‘You all want to talk politics, I want to talk movies.’ ”

It was the same thing during the campaign, Dickinson said. “When you got through the day, you were ready to relax and not talk about things that upset you, have a good meal and a drink and start out the next day.”

The way the tour worked, the plane would land somewhere, and they would face the crowds. They had all experienced public adulation. Whizzer White had scored touchdowns in giant stadiums. Dickinson had entertained troops at Christmastime, heard thousands of wolf whistles. Chandler had heard female shrieks at movie premieres.

One day at a windswept airport, Chandler heard a roar from the crowd and wondered why Republicans were being so enthusiastic. Then he realized they were cheering for Stan the Man, as if it were Sportsman’s Park.

“We were well aware they were against us,” Dickinson said. “That’s why they booed us and threw things at us. That’s why we went to those states.”

This was red-state/blue-state tension in an earlier time. Michener described one country club in Boise, Idaho, where the well-turned-out “bridge-playing women” would not even acknowledge the Democratic celebrities.

In Bloomington, Indiana, home of the University of Indiana, the Kennedy supporters were trailed by Republican fraternity and sorority members who were determined to shout them down. It got pretty nasty, Dickinson recalled.

“Boise, Salt Lake City, Denver,” she remembered. “They were all tough states.”

In Indianapolis, Shelley Winters showed up and so did Ernie Banks, who was a friend of Musial’s. Then the entourage moved on to Lexington, Kentucky.

“We all had people driving us around to our hotels,” Dickinson said. “I remember quite a tall guy drove me. About fifteen years later, I met Governor John Y. Brown and he said, ‘I was your driver.’ ” It was an experience a man would tend to remember.

Musial left after Lexington because he wanted to be home for the weekend, even though it meant missing the wrap-up rally at the New York Coliseum.

“He said, ‘Will you tell Senator Kennedy how sorry I am that I didn’t get to finish the trip?’ ” said Dickinson, who would be one of the speakers at the finale.

“My big claim to fame is that I was making my speech, I heard a hush, and they wheeled in Mrs. Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt, and I got to say, ‘What I have to say isn’t important.’ I almost was finished. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the great Eleanor Roosevelt.’ ”

Dickinson said she conveyed Musial’s regrets to Senator Kennedy. From a distance of all those years, all the gossip, her name linked to both Sinatra and Kennedy, Dickinson, with great warmth and dignity, recalled that short, heady era of John Fitzgerald Kennedy: “We got to be in the in crowd, the Sinatra crowd, and I got to meet him again. All the passion of wanting him to win.”

John F. Kennedy did win—“by a hundred thousand votes,” Dickinson said, still exuberant half a century later. “I take a lot of credit for those hundred thousand.”

Kennedy received 34,220,984 popular votes and Richard M. Nixon received 34,108,156, but the total that really mattered was the electoral votes. Kennedy gained 303 of them and Nixon had 219.

This result became a punch line for Musial over the years.

“We went to nine Western states,” he often said. “And would you believe Kennedy lost every one? Kennedy’s people said, ‘It’s a good thing we didn’t send this group to New York. We’d have lost the election.’ ”

After Kennedy squeaked through, Michener signed a photo of himself and wrote “Nixon 9, Kennedy 0” on it—just the kind of clubhouse humor Musial appreciated.

It was a good joke, although not quite accurate. Michener mentions visiting Michigan, Illinois, Nebraska, Utah, Idaho, Colorado, Indiana, and Kentucky. And Dickinson recalls Tulsa, Oklahoma. Nixon did win seven of them, but Kennedy won Michigan handily and Illinois by less than seven thousand votes. Every vote counted. And Stan the Man, at the very least, had charmed many Republican fans.

For his reward, Musial was included on the A-list at the inauguration, where Dickinson got to observe his sense of loyalty up close.

A well-connected Washingtonian, Jane E. Wheeler, who had helped during the campaign, organized a dinner party for one hundred Kennedy supporters at her home the night after the inauguration. Stan and Lil were included.

“You can imagine what a hard ticket that was,” Dickinson said.

However, there was a complication. Biggie and Teresa Garagnani had accompanied the Musials to Washington to celebrate the election of the Democrat. Musial asked that the Garagnanis be included, but Wheeler politely said she could not find two more places.

At the gala on inauguration night, Dickinson told Stan and Lil, “I’ll see you tomorrow,” but they said they would not be there.

“
I said, ‘Oh, my God, why?’ and they said, ‘We couldn’t bring Biggie, so we won’t abandon our friend,’ so they did not attend one of the most memorable dinner parties ever. Everybody who made a difference was there.”

Dickinson thought about how loyal Stan and Lil were to their friends.

“If that was me? ‘See you later,’ ” she said.

Dickinson would always feel close to her friends from summer camp. Although she never met Michener again, she said, “We were all bound emotionally as well as physically.”

A few years later, she received a photograph from Spain, where Michener was working on his book
Iberia
. The photo was of a marquee of a movie theater where Dickinson’s film,
The Poppy Is Also a Flower
, was playing. She had a major role, along with E. G. Marshall and Trevor Howard, with supporting roles from stars like Rita Hayworth, Yul Brynner, Jean-Paul Belmondo, and Marcello Mastroianni. On that marquee, Angie Dickinson’s name was in the biggest letters.

“He knew I’d like that,” Dickinson said, noting that transmitting a photograph was not as simple as in today’s digital age. “What a gracious man.”

Dickinson kept up with the Musials, once sharing girl talk with Lil at a Cardinals game in the Coliseum. “She was adorable,” Dickinson said.

When the Dodgers and Angels both moved to the new Dodger Stadium, she and Johnny Grant would sit in Sinatra’s box seats between home and first (“Frank was smart, he knew there was more action between home and first”).

Over the years, Dickinson would meet the Musials at the home of Gene and Jackie Autry. “Stan played his harmonica, Tommy Lasorda was there. Gene was a wonderful host.”

Lil could sizzle a bit when women fussed over her husband, so there was the question of what she thought of Stan’s week on the road in such gorgeous company. However, when Tom Ashley, her son-in-law, was making a documentary about Stan years later, Lil told him, “
You ought to talk to Angie Dickinson.” Ashley never got to California to meet Dickinson, but Lil’s reaction indicated she felt friendship toward the actress.

Musial and John F. Kennedy would meet only once again, during the All-Star Game in Washington in 1962. Musial always referred to him as “my buddy”—a generational thing between two gregarious warriors who knew the roar of the crowd.

R
UBEN AMARO
was called up in the summer of 1958, a slender shortstop from Mexico, the son of a famous Cuban-born slugger named Santos Amaro, who never got a chance in the majors because of his dark skin.

Worldly beyond his twenty-two years, Amaro knew a rookie’s place in the clubhouse—the far end. He observed that Musial was given two lockers, close to the tunnel, where a breeze blew in from the field.

In his own locker, Amaro found a pair of game pants at least two sizes too big. He knew better than to complain. He put on the baggy uniform and was heading toward the field when Musial turned and introduced himself.

“Everybody tells me your father was a great player in Cuba,” Musial said.

“Yes, sir,” Amaro said.

Musial said he had gone barnstorming in Cuba years earlier with the Cardinals’ coach, Mike Gonzalez.

“I believe I played against your father,” Musial said.

Then Musial called over the diminutive clubhouse man, Butch Yatkeman, who had been there forever, and said, “Butch, would you get this young man a pair of pants so he can play like a major leaguer.” Butch quickly came up with better pants.

That wasn’t the end of the kindness.

The Cardinals still had a pecking order during batting practice—older players first, younger players later, maybe. Amaro stayed back with the irregulars
until Musial noticed it and told his teammates, “Hey, he’s playing today—let him have some swings.”

Amaro would have a long career as shortstop, coach, and scout; his son, Ruben Amaro Jr., would play in the majors and become general manager of the Phillies.

Santos Amaro’s son never forgot the man who made it easier for him in a major-league clubhouse.

A
FTER SO
many years of spring training, the Musials had a routine: They would rent a house in Passe-a-Grille, near the lapping waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Yogi and Carmen Berra would rent a house nearby, and the couples would often go out for dinner, following the aroma of grilled shrimp or steaks in the warm evening air.

Dick was at Notre Dame; the two older girls would board at their Catholic school in St. Louis. It was only six weeks or so, Gerry said, but her stint in boarding school felt like six months. Jeannie was little, so Lil would take her along, a nice break from late winter in St. Louis. The Cardinals did not make Stan take many bus trips to other towns in Florida, so sometimes he would be home in midafternoon, with time to go to the beach.

The privileged life came under scrutiny in 1961, when some of the African American players began to protest the segregated living conditions of spring training.

By dragging their feet on race, the Cardinals had performed a disservice to everybody. Seven years after Jackie Robinson’s debut, the Cardinals’ first successful black player,
Brooks Lawrence, a rookie pitcher with a 15–6 record, still had to sit in the “colored” waiting room in Union Station in St. Louis while the Cardinals were waiting for their train.

Bob Dylan was preparing to write “Blowin’ in the Wind” in 1963 and Sam Cooke was about to write his prophetic “A Change Is Gonna Come,” but the Cardinals were still back in the era of “Pass the Biscuits, Mirandy.”

Trader Lane and Bing Devine had accumulated black talent but Bob Gibson, a pitcher and former basketball star out of Creighton University,
became alienated when
Hemus confused Gibson with Julio Gotay, a Latino shortstop. Even when Hemus learned to tell them apart, he made it clear that he did not think Gibson could be a major-league star.