The Era, 1947-1957: When the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers Ruled the World (17 page)

As the Yankees moved toward their final victory, MacPhail began serious drinking. He left his box during the seventh inning and began to mix Scotch and beer, with speed and gusto.

A minute after Dodger catcher Bruce Edwards bounced into the double play that ended the Series, MacPhail was standing in front of the Yankee dressing room, ignoring his players, making a speech to sportswriters.

“You fellows have been wonderful to me,” he shouted, waving a bottle of beer. “Aw, hell. Just wonderful.” He began to sob. “I’m out of the picture now. I got what I wanted. We won the World Series. I can’t take anymore. My health. My health . . .”

Writers came running down the corridors far below the three-tiered stands at Yankee Stadium. MacPhail pushed his way through them, tears running down his face, and threw an arm around dour, chipmunk-cheeked George Weiss, his farm director.

“Here, you guys,” MacPhail shouted at the reporters. “I want you to say this in your stories. I’m the guy that built up the losers, the Brooklyn club. Here’s the man who really built the Yankees.” He raised George Weiss’s right arm.

“Now I gotta talk to my players . . .”

The Yankees were drinking champagne and peeling off uniforms. MacPhail climbed on a trunk.

“I want to congratulate you fellows. Nobody beat you three in a row all season. That’s something. Isn’t that something!

“The two Joes [DiMaggio and Page]. Just wonderful. You’re all just wonderful.

“I wanted to leave at the top. You’ve made it possible. I’m through, fellows. I’m quitting right now.”

He started crying again. Then he went looking for Branch Rickey and found him amid another swarm of reporters. “You’ve got a fine team,” MacPhail said. “I want to congratulate you.”

Rickey leaned in very close. His whisper was ice. “I’ll shake your hand because I have to with these people watching. But I don’t like you, sir. Don’t care for you at all.” MacPhail wheeled away. He needed another drink.

Toward eight
P.M
. he came staggering into the press room at the Biltmore Hotel.

“I got some things to tell you writers,” he said. “Stay away from me or get punched.

“I’m not a Happy Chandler man. I’m charged by him with saying something detrimental to baseball. Never. I gave New York another championship, didn’t I?

“And what do you writers say?

“I’m nothing but a pop-off. Maybe I am but I deliver the goods. Who won the Series?”

Sid Keener, the sports editor of the St. Louis
Star-Times
, had known MacPhail for thirty years. “Larry,” he said mildly, “everyone gets criticized in your business even when they win. Branch Rickey won in St. Louis and . . .”

“Rickey?” MacPhail shouted. “Bible-quoting, hypocritical, tightwad son of a bitch. He’s worse than Chandler, worse than that goddamn hayseed we have as commissioner.”

MacPhail was shouting all this at reporters from every major newspaper in the country.

“Gotta have a victory celebration,” he said. “Have one for myself. Don’t want to have my private celebration in the Grand Ballroom where everybody’s dancing and eating roast beef.” He paused for breath. “I don’t want to have my celebration party with the damned press.” Then, doing what he said he would not do, he lurched toward the elevator to join the Yankee victory crowd, which included writers. There he came apart.

MacPhail stumbled into the party and dropped into a chair beside John McDonald, who had worked for him in Brooklyn. He began a fresh assault on Rickey.

“I got no complaints with him,” McDonald said. “Rickey looks after people he likes.”

“You’re defending Rickey here?” MacPhail said. “Here where you’re my guest, the Yankees’ guest? You Judas. Stand up.”

As McDonald rose, MacPhail swung a right hand into McDonald’s left eye. The two were separated.

MacPhail lurched about and spotted George Weiss, the man he had praised generously a few hours before. “You gonna do what I tell you from now on,” MacPhail said, “or are you gonna quit?”

Weiss blinked in confusion.

“Look, you son of a bitch. You got forty-eight hours to make up your mind. What are you going to do?”

“We’ve all been drinking, Larry,” Weiss said. “Why can’t we talk tomorrow?”

“You’re going to talk with me now, or you’re fired. Wait. I just changed my mind about that. You’re fired now, Weiss. Tomorrow? I’ll give you tomorrow. Stop by my office for your final check tomorrow, Weiss. You’re through.”

“Oh, dear,” said Weiss’s wife, Hazel. “Larry. Please. We need the job.”

“Stay away from me,” MacPhail said. Hazel Weiss began to weep. MacPhail continued to lurch around the room. He spotted Dan Topping, big, Anaconda Copper–rich Dan Topping, who owned one-third of the Yankees.

“Hey, Topping,” MacPhail said. “You know what you are? A guy born with a silver spoon in his mouth who never made a dollar in his life.”

Topping seized MacPhail’s left arm. “Listen, you,” Topping said. “We’ve taken everything from you we’re going to take.” Topping wrestled MacPhail into the hotel kitchen. He was bigger than MacPhail, younger by twenty years, physically stronger, and considerably more sober. He shook MacPhail roughly in the kitchen, punched him with a few body blows, and ordered MacPhail to behave. “If you act up again, Larry,” Topping said, “I’m gonna knock your head off. Now go into the washroom and clean yourself up and for Christ sakes, comb your hair.”

About half an hour later — ten
P.M
. — a subdued MacPhail returned, properly groomed. But the whiskey and the mindless rage still burned within him.

He walked up to Joe Page, who was sitting with his wife. “What were you, Joe, before I picked you up? A bum. You and this broad here, you were nothing. I bought a home for you. You’re wearing nice clothes now. You’re drinking champagne. But without me, the two of you would be starving.”

Topping was approaching with a murderous look. Mrs. Page burst into tears.

MacPhail weaved away from the couple. Then this wondrous, bizarre, driven character staggered out of the room and out of the victory party and out of baseball.

“My dad made a lot of money,” Lee MacPhail said recently, “and he spent a lot of money, too. Don’t take this in the wrong way. Nobody has more appreciation for my dad’s brilliance than I. But in a sense he lived too long. He insisted on managing his own financial affairs, even when it was clear that age was taking its toll. By the time my father died in 1975, he’d gone through every cent he had.

“Dad died broke.”

The gentleman’s agreement on not reporting victory parties was dead by the morning of October 7, 1947. An extraordinary New York newspaper called
PM
, which accepted no advertising, had hired an acerbic Brooklyn Irishman named Tom Meany to write its baseball. Meany recounted some of MacPhail’s behavior and concluded his column:

Larry retains his title as headline champ. MacPhail is more emotional, without needing a warm-up, than Sarah Bernhardt. Larry always said he wanted to quit while on top. It should be recorded that Joe Page, with his winning performance, drove Larry out of baseball. Through the first six games, it looked as though it might have been vice versa.

The World Series and MacPhail finished simultaneously. Larry was sobbing when he announced that he was through. He set a record for sobbing in a seven-game series.

It took hard digging to ascertain what had been happening fundamentally in the Yankee front office. Behind an episode of apparent alcohol-induced psychosis lay very rugged fiscal stuff.

Some weeks earlier MacPhail had begun private talks with several Wall Street firms — Bear, Stearns and John J. Bergen & Co. — with an eye toward selling Yankee stock to the public. He produced books indicating that the Yankees of 1946 earned a profit of $1.35 per share. Since shares had a par value of $10, the team was returning better than thirteen percent. And 1947, with the pennant and the World Series, was going to be even better.

MacPhail and the brokers proposed to sell to the public 300,000 shares of new stock at $10 or possibly $15 a share. In restructuring the franchise, this would represent half of all Yankee stock, minus 100 shares. MacPhail, Topping, and Webb would retain operational control, and the public, getting not quite fifty percent, would pump $3,000,000 or possibly $4,500,000 worth of new money into the Yankees. MacPhail could then put a third of that, at least a million dollars, into his pocket or into a horse farm he had purchased in Bel Air, Maryland. “What Larry wanted most,” Tom Meany remembered, “was not just to be a winner. He wanted to be a squire, like Thomas Jefferson, only richer.”

In 1947, as today, organized baseball discouraged public ownership. Almost every major league club is privately held. In essence, baseball’s books are closed. Profit figures are kept secret — if anything, more so today than in the 1940s.

But even in 1947 various owners did not want to see baseball’s flagship franchise go public. MacPhail’s partners, Dan Topping and Del Webb, had personal fortunes. They didn’t need to raise cash as MacPhail felt he did. After furious exchanges, Topping and Webb agreed to purchase MacPhail’s third interest in the Yankees for an even $2,000,000. (Remember, MacPhail had come in with a million dollars two seasons before.) MacPhail would have pretax profit of a cool million. The Yankees would sell zero stock, none at all, to the public. Their books would remain closed.

Before the weeping and the punching, the assault on George Weiss, the humiliation of Mr. and Mrs. Joe Page, MacPhail had accepted the Topping-Webb offer. He had his million. But that was not all he wanted.

Larry MacPhail wanted to have his million and he wanted to keep running the Yankees. He wanted to live like Jefferson from Monday to Friday and weekend like Louis XIV. He wanted to breed horses and win pennants and bend people to his will. He wanted a coterie of vassals, a bowing press, and, oh yes, he wanted very much to be loved.

As I say, the MacPhail I met in 1952 seemed recovered and resigned to a life outside of baseball. By that time the Yankees had evolved into a different kind of organization: cold, efficient, impersonal, openly bigoted against blacks, perpetually triumphant.

In a weak moment at the Players Club during the summer of ‘52 Red Smith admitted that he did, as a matter of fact, root for those antiseptic Yankees.

An unemployed actor was Smith’s bar companion.

“But Red,” the actor said. “How can you root for the Yankees? That’s like rooting for U.S. Steel.”

What happened to the Yankees in 1948, immediately after MacPhail’s departure? What became of them?

Nothing happened to the Yankees in 1948. They didn’t become. DiMaggio had a fine year, with thirty-nine home runs, but Page drank his way to a mediocre season. Discipline faded under Bucky Harris, who could not control his team or get along with George Weiss. The Yankees finished third behind the Cleveland Indians and the Red Sox.

Joe McCarthy, the famous old Yankee manager, now was managing the Red Sox. Casey Stengel, fifty-eight years old, was managing the Oakland Oaks of the Pacific Coast League.

The Yankee future was in doubt.

L
EO ERNEST DUROCHER
, of West Springfield, Massachusetts; Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Beverly Hills, seldom drank spiritous liquids. Durocher’s vocabulary would make a longshoreman wince.* He gambled incessantly, unscrupulously fleecing innocents. His pursuit of women was relentless. Leo was one foul-mouthed pool hall hustler of a rake. But unlike Larry MacPhail, he seldom drank. Durocher never, ever, wanted to lose control.

My first extended exposure to Durocher came in February and March of 1954, when I was sent to Phoenix to cover a spring training. Durocher dominated the Giant press corps with a combination of charm and threats. He supplied bourbon to the alcoholic man from the
New York Post
. He lent money to the reporter from the
Daily News
. (“But if you ever knock me in the paper, Jim, I’m calling in my fucking note.”) He promised me a variety of exclusive stories, if I wrote them from his point of view. Providing only that I compose the gospel according to St. Leo, I could scoop all of New York, at least once a week.

He fascinated me. He was a fascinating character. He told baseball stories beautifully and Hollywood stories just about as well. He knew Sinatra, Hope, Crosby. He knew everybody. That spring, Paramount was shooting a comic circus movie near Phoenix, with a cast that included Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, then still speaking, and a radiantly bleached blonde actress of wide repute.

One day I stared after the actress, who was passing through a hotel lobby, and Durocher said, “Like that?”

“Umm.”

“I’m fucking her, you know,” Durocher told me.

“Who?”

He said her name. “That’s why you don’t see me around the lobby in the nighttime.”

I could not believe what I was hearing.

“You,” I said, very slowly. “You and that movie star?”

“Sure, kid,” Durocher said, “but I gotta stop fucking her Wednesday.”

“Why?”

“Because my wife is flying in.”

Leo Durocher had to stop sleeping with one gorgeous actress because his wife, gorgeous Laraine Day, was coming to town. My face showed amazement. “Stick with me, kid,” Durocher said. “Write what I tell you, good positive stuff.

“Do that and I’ll teach you how to get movie stars to go to bed with you.”

Durocher’s season in exile, 1947, was troubled. Branch Rickey told reporters as background — material to use, but without specific attribution — that Chandler’s decree suspending Durocher was unfair. The Brooklyn franchise was putatively bound by the rulings of the commissioner, including his order of silence. But for his part, Rickey said, he intended to see that, suspended or not, Durocher received his full salary as manager — approximately $30,000.

To hold Durocher’s interest, Rickey had an assistant send a daily telegram to California reporting on the progress of the Dodgers. The telegrams arrived regularly at Durocher’s home. The paychecks did not. Durocher did some card table hustling and made a little money, but not enough.

Rickey ducked urgent calls. “I got that message,” Durocher said. He then telephoned George V. McLaughlin, a banker who was in essence the Dodgers’ chief financial officer.