Stan Musial (47 page)

He did have a business, Stan the Man, Inc., which sold memorabilia and booked him for autograph shows. He was certainly civic-minded about showing up for good causes, was generous in many ways. But DiMaggio had his name on a children’s hospital in Florida, and Williams was identified with the Jimmy Fund in Boston. Yogi had an active museum in his name on a college campus in Montclair, New Jersey. Musial was mostly identified with the Cardinals, with his crouch, which was more than fine for fans of a certain age.

In his own whaddayasay manner, Musial presented his version of Stan the Man. This was the impression of Fay Vincent, the business executive who became an accidental commissioner when his friend Bart Giamatti died suddenly in 1989. Vincent had worked in Hollywood, understood the power of image, and sensed that Musial did, too. Vincent felt the man was more complicated than he appeared, had an agenda, a perfectly fine one, behind the smile and the harmonica.

“
You have a feeling, he’s been a public figure for so long, there is a public figure that he wants you to see,” Vincent said, adding, “I saw a little glimpse of it.”

Vincent continued: “If you opened the door of the public Musial and went to the next level, there are a fair number of other dimensions to him. I think he works very hard, as DiMaggio did, to keep you and other people from ever getting to any of those other rooms or dimensions. DiMaggio was world-class at it.”

Each member of The Big Three had his own style in old age.

Musial was as close to a normal retired guy as a superstar can become, a frequent sight in the normal life of St. Louis. One friend of mine recalls Stan and Lil testing mattresses in a St. Louis department store by bouncing around on them.

Ted Williams mellowed, became accessible—goddam right he did—talked hitting endlessly.

Joe DiMaggio was more of a hermit, trusting himself with a few close friends, hoarding freebie golf bags he had cadged at celebrity outings.

For many years, the Clipper would visit the Super Bowl with Nick Nicolosi, a businessman from New Jersey, who organized the annual Super Bowl golf party. Nicolosi, who referred to himself as “The Ringmaster,” would rent a suite with two bedrooms connected by a parlor and install the Clipper in the other room.

DiMaggio had a few demands, including a supply of fresh bananas. When visitors came to the suite to pick up tickets or to schmooze, DiMaggio was not shy about letting them know the bananas were his and his alone.

In return for the bananas, DiMaggio would answer calls for his buddy.

One afternoon DiMaggio picked up the phone and said, “Yes, Nick is here, may I tell him who’s calling?”

“My name is Stan Musial,” the voice said.

“Musial, Musial, how do I know that name?” DiMaggio asked.

The voice at the other end said, well, he had played a little ball.

“I played a little ball too. My name is DiMaggio. Joe DiMaggio.”

At that, DiMaggio held out the phone for Nicolosi, who could hear Musial sputtering on the other end.

When Musial finally regained his speech, he said: “Boy, Nick, you must pay pretty good to have the great DiMaggio answering your phone.”

SOMEHOW, VINCENT
felt, he did not get to know Musial as well as the other two sluggers.

“There were many, many sides for him,” Vincent said. “The kid from Donora. The prodigy, if you will. He never forgot that. The religious side of him, very, very Catholic,” said Vincent, who often saw Musial at Mass.

Musial sometimes sent Vincent an itinerary or folder or Michener memento from his trips to Poland—“something he wanted me to see,” Vincent said. But that was not so unusual, either, because Musial was a generous writer of notes, a spontaneous giver of gifts.

“He was very aggressive in making me see the celebratory side of him, a little like DiMaggio,” Vincent continued. “Here was this legend, this great figure. It was almost like he was making me see that he was a great man and a great ballplayer. He didn’t have to persuade me at all, but he worked pretty hard at it.”

Well, don’t we all. Sportswriters spend decades speaking the patois of the locker room, as if that makes athletes out of us. Everybody wants street cred. It would be a shock if the greatest of ballplayers, the ultimate self-made men, did not privately ponder what civilians really thought of them.

Williams hid his complexities behind his bluster. DiMaggio held people off with a hauteur that could only have been intentional.

“There was a fundamental insecurity in him, as there was in DiMaggio,” Vincent said of Musial. “I don’t know if it was ethnic. There is in all of us, I guess,” mused Vincent, whose own nickname is a diminutive, among the Irish, of his given name of Francis.

Vincent loved his job, loved spending part of his life around such a man. He could totally understand that Musial might have “sort of a compulsion to convince you how good he was.”

There was little ambiguity to Musial. He had almost never been criticized in public, encountered no pressure to push up his draft call during the war. When Bob Burnes criticized him in a column for endorsing cigarettes in his smoking days, Musial gave up the few dollars of income long before he gave up the habit, and he always told children never to touch tobacco. He had never held himself up as a model of anything, just lived his life.

THE BIGGEST
public blowup in Musial’s life came after the death of Biggie in 1967. Without his partner to rely on, Musial turned over more of the business to his oldest child, Richard.

From the start, Stan seemed to understand he could not take his son into that exalted level of the family business, that is to say, hitting. Stan also recognized that the road trips and the hours at the restaurant had taken him away from his oldest child during his formative years.

“I wasn’t able to give Dick the close relationship many fathers and sons enjoy, and, in an old-fashioned way, I expected more of him than I did his sisters. I guess girls do wrap their fathers around their little fingers,” Musial said in his autobiography.

Coming through the ubiquitous Broeg filter, this comment suggests a distance between father and son. By the time Musial retired in 1963, Dick
was already a father, who continued to work with—or for—his father for many decades. Dick managed hotels in St. Louis, Florida, and the Ozarks, along with the bowling alley in St. Louis, a dealing that ultimately became toxic.

Musial and Joe Garagiola had become business partners in 1958 with the Red Bird Lanes on Gravois in South St. Louis. This was a logical extension of the psychic partnership they had formed back in Springfield in 1941, when Garagiola had been salted away by Branch Rickey. Although he was five years younger than Musial, the kid from the Hill showed far more public assurance than the slender young man from the Mon Valley.

When Garagiola arrived to help win the 1946 World Series, Musial recognized that Garagiola possessed what is called the gift of gab, and they developed a tandem, an act. Musial would be invited to sports functions and would bring along his pal, the talking catcher. Stan would chatter for as long as he could, then he would ask Garagiola to say a few words, or more than a few words.

“
You know, Joe and I both have mike fright,” Musial would say. “I’m afraid to get the mike, and he’s afraid he’s not going to get it.”

Their friendship grew as they drove the highways of Missouri and Illinois to their speaking engagements. When Musial retired in 1963, Garagiola served as master of ceremonies at the huge celebration.

In 1986, St. Louis residents were stunned to learn that two of their greatest civic heroes were involved in litigation.

“
The headline in the newspaper, ‘Garagiola Sues Musial,’ made Cardinal fans wince. It was a dagger in Stan’s heart. Who the hell could sue Stan Musial?” said Jack Buck.

Actually, headlines in the
Post-Dispatch
included: “Musial Cries ‘Foul’ on Garagiolas’ Suit” and “Stan and Joe: Business Splits Old Friends,” but give Buck credit for poetic license.

The suit was filed in April 1986 in the U.S. District Court, Eastern District Court of Missouri. Garagiola and his wife, Audrie, claimed that Dick Musial, Theresa Garagnani, Biggie’s widow, and Jack Garagnani—as management of Red Bird Lanes—had lent approximately $130,000 to the restaurant Stan Musial and Biggie’s, which was now going through hard times. The two sons had tried switching the menu from steak to French, producing a loss of around $3 million.

The suit also claimed that Dick Musial and Jack Garagnani had received approximately $54,000 in management fees from the partnership over three years without the knowledge of the Garagiolas.

The Musial lawyers said the loans from the bowling alley to the restaurant, and other businesses, had been paid back, but the Garagiolas claimed this happened only after the suit was filed. Lawyers for the Musials said the Garagiolas had moved from St. Louis long ago and had not taken an active part in the business, and that the two sons had taken a more active role in 1982 out of necessity.

It is hard to imagine Stan Musial kiting money or approving of it. Whether the two sons consciously hid their management fees from Garagiola is not easy to determine. A confidante of Musial said years later that when Garagiola raised the issue, “Stan’s position with Joe was, ‘Give me a number.’ ”

The suit was settled just before a court appearance, with both sides pledged to confidentiality and sharing the court costs. Like a messy divorce that haunts weddings, funerals, and birthdays, the Musial-Garagiola feud complicated St. Louis gatherings both public and private for decades, catching loyal friends in the middle.

Garagiola rarely spoke about the rift, once telling somebody he had come to realize Musial was not a nice person. There were suggestions that Musial, prior to settling, had shown a heretofore unseen brusque side, in effect saying,
Who are they going to believe, you or me?
Having known Garagiola since the 1960s, I thought he might talk about the rift, but he declined, graciously. His pain came through the phone.

“
It was no coincidence that the only year Musial did not go to Cooperstown for the Hall of Fame ceremonies was the year Garagiola was inducted into the broadcaster’s wing of the Hall,” wrote Jack Buck (with the assistance of, you guessed it, Bob Broeg).

Buck/Broeg added: “If I want to get a rise out of Musial even today, I’ll say, ‘Heard from Joe lately?’ Stan will answer, ‘You mean DiMaggio?’ Then I’ll respond, ‘No, Garagiola’ and he will become airborne. It’s a shame, but they’ll never patch it up. I know Joe feels badly about it and when Stan was ill a few years ago, Joe was really hoping they could get back together, but it never happened.”

The Cardinals’ staff learned to separate Musial and Garagiola when
they absolutely had to be at the ballpark at the same time, but sometimes there was the occasional gaffe. When the Cardinals played in the 2006 World Series, somebody on the promotion staff arranged for Musial and Garagiola to throw out the ceremonial first ball together. On the morning of the game, Musial called in sick and Ozzie Smith was hastily recruited to replace him. As soon as Garagiola was out of St. Louis airspace, Musial recovered sufficiently to toss out the ball the next day.

The ruined friendship hung over Musial, exposed a melancholy side, a trace of vindictiveness. Or maybe it was old age coming on.

“Stan hated confrontation. He could get down, to where you didn’t want to approach him. He wasn’t a lot of fun for a year or so after that,” somebody close to him said.

EARLY IN
1996, James N. Giglio, a professor from what is now known as Missouri State University, began working on a biography of Musial, but he soon discovered that Musial did not want to help anybody writing a book about him.

In July of 1996, Giglio published an article in the
Missouri Historical Review
about Musial’s few months in Springfield in 1941. While depicting Stan and Lil as doting young parents, Giglio quoted an elderly bartender saying she did not like baseball.

It was a fairly innocuous and understandable remark from a young wife with a child far from home, who had seen her husband play four years in the minors for minimal pay. Ultimately, Giglio did not use the comment in his very thorough biography,
Musial: From Stash to Stan the Man
, published by the University of Missouri Press in 2001. By that time, Musial had closed doors to some people who talked about him.

One shunned acquaintance was William Bottonari, a high school classmate from Donora who had gone away to college and settled in a suburb of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Occasionally he and Musial would get together in St. Louis when Bottonari came to town on shoe business.

Bottonari said Musial once told him: “You can hold the meeting in my hotel, you can meet at my restaurant and you can bowl at my bowling alley. The only thing you can’t have is the shirt off my back.” Musial often sent gifts to Bottonari, a Musial bat or a Musial poster, addressing them himself with his elegant cursive script, signing them to his good friend Bill.

Sometimes they would meet at reunions in Donora, where Musial
would greet everybody, pass out autographed cards, and even slip money to one cause or another, although never enough to satisfy everybody.

“Heroes are not appreciated,” Bottonari said in 2008. “I suggested to one of the businessmen there ought to be a Stan Musial museum and he just made a face.”

Bottonari was a civic gadfly who attended public hearings in his town to complain about school taxes, who fought for public gardens. He also went back home and gave Giglio a walking tour of Donora.

Shortly thereafter, Musial called Bottonari at home, “which he had not done in many years, or ever,” Bottonari said. Musial fished around—
Hey, Bill, what are you up to?
—until Bottonari finally got his drift and said, “Aw, heck, Stan, I was over at Donora.” Musial probably already knew this, since he had his eyes and ears in his hometown. He did not confront Bottonari about the tour but chatted a few more seconds and then said goodbye. Bottonari never heard from him again.