The Last Boy (22 page)

Osteen held his breath and watched Mantle’s hands. “The bat looked like it was forty-two or forty-four inches long,” he said. “It could have been fifty inches long, and you knew he could swing it.”

Mantle swung—and hit a nice little grounder to the shortstop. He had brought his hands out too far to get the barrel of the bat on the ball. That’s when Osteen knew: “If I can get this guy out, I’m capable of getting anybody out.”

He also knew how easily it could have gone the other way. The margin of error was a sliver of daylight. Which explains why when he was asked how he had pitched to Mantle, the late Frank Sullivan said, “With tears in my eyes.”

“Oh,
that
night,” Carmen Berra said, recalling Billy Martin’s twenty-ninth birthday, the last one before you get old. Mickey and Whitey had planned a night on the town. Gil and Lucille McDougald were invited but had made other plans. Elston and Arlene Howard couldn’t get a babysitter. Andy Carey and Jerry Coleman declined. “Who’s coming?” Coleman asked. Hearing the guest list, he said, “I think I’ll pass.”

Bob Cerv and Irv Noren, former teammates in town with the Kansas City A’s, joined Carmen and Yogi Berra, Joan and Whitey Ford, Hank and Charlene Bauer, Merlyn and Mickey Mantle, Johnny Kucks, and the birthday boy for dinner at Danny’s Hideaway, where he was toasted often and liberally. When everyone else headed to the Waldorf-Astoria for an after-dinner drink or two and Johnnie Ray’s 10:30
P.M.
show, Cerv and Noren went home to bed.

The pastry chef at the Waldorf baked a birthday cake, which the Yankees took with them when they decided to go see Sammy Davis, Jr., at the Copacabana. “I was the one that insisted we bring Billy’s cake,” Carmen said.

It was the era of mink stoles, pink gardenias, and floor shows. Legs were gams; bands were big. The Copa was a mainstay of New York café society,
the
nightspot for “stay-outs and their pin-ups—three shows a
night, seven nights a week, at 8, 12, and again at 2.” The Copa billed itself as “the hottest club north of Havana.” Located at 10 East 60th Street, just off Central Park, the sober limestone exterior with the decorous burgundy awning gave no hint of the prevailing Latin attitudes and latitudes in the basement of the sedate Fifth Avenue apartment building.

The Yankees and their baked goods arrived in time for the 2
A.M.
show. Jules Podell, who ruled the club with an iron fist and a massive gold pinky ring, took care of them. He was a Yankee fan. “They put a special table for us up front,” Carmen said. “We were the kings and queens of New York.”

Being of such regal stature meant that you could disappear below the city streets into a fantasy world (capacity 670) populated with bold-faced names and the gossip columnists who lavished them with ink. Leonard Lyons, Walter Winchell, Ed Sullivan, and Dorothy Kilgallen mingled with talent scouts, casting agents, sports stars and the wise-guy colleagues of the club’s very silent owner, mob boss Frank Costello.

The headliners—Frank Sinatra and Jimmy Durante, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Tony Bennett and Sammy Davis, Jr.—usually got more play in the morning papers than the swells seated in the plush semicircular banquettes. But not the morning after Billy Martin’s birthday party.

Also celebrating that night at two large tables nearby were members of an upper Manhattan bowling club, the Republicans, who had begun their evening with dinner at Mama Leone’s. There were nineteen in their party, among them Edwin Jones, forty-two, of 600 West 188th Street, who went over to pay his respects, draping a familiar arm over Martin’s shoulder.

What happened after that remained a matter of dispute. Did the Yankees resent the intrusive bonhomie? Did the bowlers take umbrage at the VIP treatment the ballplayers received? Accounts vary. One thing they all agreed on: everyone had had a lot to drink. Words were exchanged between the tables, and between the bowlers and the stage. Then they traded fisticuffs. Leonard Lyons, making rounds for his “Lyons Den” column in the
Post
, wrote: “The great battlefields include Bastogne, Verdun, Gettysburg and the kitchen of the Copacabana. The nightclub fracas, front page yesterday, was preceded by a racial slur, directed at Sammy Davis Junior’s farewell show.”

The
Journal-American
story quoted an anonymous Yankee wife:
“ ‘What started the whole thing was that someone at the bowlers’ tables—and they were a noisy group—called Sammy Davis a name that sounded like Sabu.’ That angered the singer and he shouted, ‘Will the person who called me that come forth?’”

In 1944, Harry Belafonte was banned from the club just before shipping out with the U.S. Navy. The following year, Lena Horne used her clout in contract negotiations to desegregate the main dining room downstairs. But racial tensions persisted in America. “They were calling Sammy Davis, Jr., Little Black Sambo,” Merlyn Mantle told me. “Four guys came to his aid,” and asked the bowlers “to tone it down.”

Among the four, Hank Bauer: “We’ve got ringside seats, great big round table, and we’re drinking B & B and coffee. And this big fat Jewish guy came walking by me. He said, ‘Don’t test your luck too far tonight, Yankee.’”

Bauer assumed Jones was Jewish after reading that he owned a delicatessen. “I give him my best vocabulary—two words. And now he’s down at the end of the table, him and his son-in-law, I think it was. The son-in-law went back to the men’s room.”

Martin, an improbable peacemaker, got up to have a word with him. Mantle followed. “So Ford says, ‘You better go see what the hell’s happening,’” Bauer said. “My wife, Charlene, says, ‘It ain’t none of your business.’

“I say, ‘Yes, it is.’ I went back there, and I opened up the door. I saw nothing but tuxedos. And Yogi and Johnny Kucks ran into me and said, ‘Get the hell out of here.’”

Edwin Jones, the convivial bowler, was unconscious on the floor.

One of New York’s finest arrived on the scene, summoned an ambulance, and reported the incident to the station house on East 51st Street. Detective Chris Coyle, who was assigned to investigate, decided, “This case is too hot to handle,” the
Journal-American
reported, and referred the matter to the Manhattan district attorney.

Lyons elaborated in his May 19 column: “Davis was at the drums when the commotion started and so none of us could hear, or in the darkened club see the action in the rear involving the Yankee ballplayers. On my way out, I saw the victim being carried into an ambulance, and so I returned to the Copa Lounge and there met the ballplayers. Yogi
Berra noticed I was asking questions. He feigned utter innocence, walked toward me and greeted: ‘Hello, what’s new?’”

Lyons kept the rest of the conversation off the record but shared the details with his son, film critic Jeffrey Lyons. “Yogi and my father were about the same height,” Jeff Lyons said. “He couldn’t see easily over Yogi’s shoulder. Yogi shifted left and right to keep my father out. My father said, ‘You give me an exclusive and I’ll tell you the way out the secret passage when it was a speakeasy.’”

Thus, the New York Yankees made their getaway.

At 3:16
A.M
., Jones was admitted to the emergency room at Roosevelt Hospital, where he was treated by a young medical resident named Cedric Priebe, whose report noted: “Nose broken (but not displaced); ribs, scalp and jaw bruised; x-rays inconclusive.”

Jones didn’t know who or what had hit him—he said he remembered nothing until he woke up at the hospital, which was odd since he walked in on his own two feet. The next morning, he was well enough to receive reporters at his upper Manhattan apartment, where he professed love and affection for Hank Bauer. “I’m not going to make a case of it,” he said.

To which his lawyer, Anthony Zingales, replied, “You be quiet.”

By the time the Berras got home to New Jersey, the Yankees had dispatched their private investigators. “Yogi called Johnny Kucks at 5
A.M.
and said, ‘Don’t open your door,’” Carmen said. “Because he was young, they didn’t want him to get in trouble.”

At the station house, Leonard Jones, the victim’s brother, filed a complaint against Bauer, the ex-Marine, known to his teammates as “The Bruiser,” charging him with felonious assault.

The morning papers had already gone to bed by the time the Bauers got back to their apartment in the Concourse Plaza. “About four o’clock in the morning, the phone rang,” Bauer said. “It’s a writer. ‘Hank, what are you going to do about this?’

“I says, ‘Now what the hell are you talking about?’

“ ‘Well, this guy claims you hit him.’

“I said, ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t hit anybody.’

“Now we’re up, and the bellboy calls me and he said, ‘Hank, don’t come down here.’

“I said, ‘Why not?’

“He said the lobby’s full of writers, TV cameras, and everything. He says, ‘When you get ready to go to the ballpark, you give me a call, and I’ll take you down on the freight elevator.’

“Now, at the ballpark, the first guy I run into was Casey. ‘What happened?’ I said, ‘Case, I’ll tell you the truth. I wanted to hit that guy, but I didn’t.’”

He couldn’t have, he explained, because Berra and Kucks were holding on to his arms. And, besides, the club’s bouncers had assured him,
we know how to take care of this
.

“Now Dan Topping comes in. He says, ‘I warned you sons of bitches.’ So he fines us each a thousand dollars.

“And I went to Mickey and I says, ‘Mick, when the hell did we get a warning?’ He says, ‘You wasn’t at that party.’”

The Yankees issued a statement saying that their private investigators had satisfied general manager George Weiss that none of the players had struck anyone. The afternoon tabloids blared the news:

YANKEES’ BAUER IN COPA BRAWL

—
New York Post
, May 16, 1957, front page

BAUER: I DIDN’T SOCK GUY IN KISSER

—
New York Post
, May 16, 1957

IT WASN’T A NO-HITTER

—New York
Journal-American
, May 16, 1957

The
Post
earnestly listed possible managerial sanctions, including “the silent treatment.” But Stengel had plenty to say to the papers. He benched Berra and Ford and dropped Bauer to eighth in the batting order. Martin was injured and not expected to play. He didn’t expect to remain a Yankee either. “I’m gone,” he told Mantle, who batted third as usual.

“I’m mad at him, too,” Stengel assured reporters. “But I’m not mad enough to take a chance on losing a ball game and possibly the pennant.”

In January 1957, Mantle took a break from rubber chicken to negotiate a new contract with George Weiss. He asked for $65,000, twice his 1956 salary. The general manager replied with a threat, slamming a fat file full of incriminating evidence on his desk. To wit: “Billy Martin and Mickey Mantle left the St. Moritz at 6 P.M. Came in at 3:47 A.M.”

He had brandished the same damning (albeit thinner) dossier after the 1953 check-signing caper at the Latin Quarter. The GM’s paid gumshoes were kept very busy keeping up with Mantle—though their attempts to do so could be comically inept. One evening that spring in Detroit, lobby sitters in the team hotel watched in amusement as Weiss’s hired help tailed the wrong guys, following Tony Kubek and Bobby Richardson to a YMCA for an evening of Ping-Pong. A taxicab ferrying Mantle and Ford circled the block and returned them to the hotel unnoticed.

Stengel’s method of surveillance was simpler: he’d send the elevator operator upstairs after midnight to get autographs, thus documenting via absent signatures the curfew breakers. Stengel’s biographer, Robert Creamer, cited the Ol’ Perfessor’s adage about tomcatting ballplayers: “It ain’t getting it that hurts them, it’s staying up all night looking for it. They gotta learn that if you don’t get it by midnight, you ain’t gonna get it, and if you do, it ain’t worth it.”

There was nothing funny or subtle about Weiss’s attempted blackmail, recounted by Mantle in
The Mick
. “He pats the folder, leans back in his chair, and twiddles his thumbs…With slow deliberation he checks through a batch of papers and suddenly slaps them down on the desk. ‘Here, take a look,’ he says, the venom returning to his voice. ‘I wouldn’t want this to get into Merlyn’s hands.’”

He also mentioned a potential trade to the Cleveland Indians for Rocky Colavito and Herb Score. In an interview years later posted on Tim McCarver’s Web site years later, Mantle compared the general manager’s dictatorial ways to those of Adolf Hitler. “He felt like he was the Führer,” Mantle said.

Mantle headed for Rochester, New York, to accept the Hickok Belt,
annually presented to the year’s best professional athlete, and went back to Commerce without a contract. One morning, he showed up at his friend Jack Meier’s house as he often did, having had too much to drink. “He pulls up in a Lincoln, honks the horn, Dad goes out,” said Jack’s son, Mike, who was in third grade then. “It’s ten, eleven
A.M.
I wanted to go with my Dad. He said, ‘Come along, get in the backseat.’ The backseat had trash, magazines, beer cans. I see something real shiny, a big, shiny, gold thing on the floorboard. I pulled it out. I said, ‘Hey, Mickey, what’s this?’”

It was the sports world’s gaudiest piece of jewelry, an alligator strap encrusted with a four-carat diamond and twenty-six gem chips valued at more than $10,000. “He said, ‘Let me have that a minute.’ He handed it to my Dad. He said, ‘Here, Jack, this is what you get, a prize belt, instead of money.’”

Del Webb and Dan Topping intervened with Weiss and got Mantle his desired raise.

He was the king of New York. Everybody loved Mickey. “Mickey, who?” the singer Teresa Brewer chirped. “The fella with the celebrated swing.” Men wanted to be him. Women wanted to be with him. His dominion was vast, and his subjects were ardent (one fan asked Lenox Hill Hospital for the tonsils he had removed following the 1956 season). Mantle accepted his due with that great drawbridge of a smile that yanked the right-hand corner of his mouth upward to reveal a set of all-American choppers. “When he laughed, he just laughed all over,” his teammate Jerry Lumpe said.

Why wouldn’t he? Wherever he went—Danny’s Hideaway, the Latin Quarter, the “21” Club, the Stork Club, El Morocco, and Toots Shor’s—his preferred drink was poured when he walked through the door. Reporters waited at his locker for monosyllabic bon mots. Boys clustered by the players’ gate, hoping to touch him. It wasn’t enough to gawk at his impossibly broad shoulders and fire-hydrant neck. They wanted tactile reassurance that he was for real. They scratched his arms, his face, and stabbed him with ballpoint pens. When his little brother Larry got lost in the crowd, and a cop hollered, “Who’s the brother?” A hundred boys answered, “I am.”