Jane Leavy

Summary: A biography of the life of Mickey Mantle, covering his family roots, baseball career, and post-career life, including his injuries, alcoholism, affairs, and something of a redemption at the end of his life.

Every summer, I read at least one baseball book, and so when I received this book as a gift earlier this year, I knew what my book would be this year, not that I would need much persuading. Mickey Mantle was one of my childhood heroes, even though, as an Indians fan, he played for show more the hated Yankees. We all followed the rivalry between him and Roger Maris to see if either could break Ruth’s record of 60 home runs. We all tried to switch hit when we played baseball, something most of us did very badly. We debated, as this book explores, whether Mickey Mantle or Willie Mays was the better player.

I was also pleased to see this was written by Jane Leavy. I had thoroughly enjoyed her biography of another childhood hero, Sandy Koufax. Mantle, it turns out was a far more complicated person, a mix of the great and the tragic and the tawdry wrapped into a single individual.

She tells Mantle’s story around twenty key dates in his life, which sometimes involves some back and forth between the key date and events prior and following. She begins with his family, and the powerful influence of his father, Mutt, who did not want his son to spend his life in the mines, taught him to bat from both sides, and guided him just long enough for him to get a contract with the Yankees before he died at an early age from the cancer that seemed to run through the family. Long enough to push him to the edge of greatness, but not long enough to help him deal with that greatness.

We learn of Mantle the athlete and his incredible speed and power and the tantalizing “what ifs” of just how great he could have been. In his first season with the Yankees, in 1951, running for a fly ball in the World Series, he caught a cleat in a drain in the outfield left uncovered, and blew out his right knee before there was such a thing as ACL surgery. He was never the same, and part of the story was how he could play at such a high level despite the physical problems that multiplied over the years. Leavy chronicles in detail the home run out of Griffith stadium in 1953 and enlists physicists and witnesses to figure out how far it actually traveled. She even includes analyses of his swings from both sides of the plate, and the near perfect form Mantle had at his best. She recounts his last at bat.

One of the great “what ifs” has to do with how Mantle lived off the field, something sportswriters in the Fifties and Sixties kept hush-hush, at least until a Yankee brawl at the Copacabana. Mantle was a high-functioning alcoholic in these years, at some points even hitting home runs when he wasn’t completely sober. Only in the Sixties, did this begin to tell on his body, combined with his injuries. She also doesn’t shy away from his womanizing and the complicated relationship he and Merlyn Mantle had throughout his life,

After baseball, he was unable to find something to do with his life. He was troubled by thoughts of an early death, which ran in his family. The drinking and affairs continue. He doesn’t listen to the few who try to warn him. “Sudden” Sam McDowell, former Indians fastballer and a reformed alcoholic tried to organize an intervention, only to have it aborted after a “friend” tips off Mantle. He tried and failed at a number of ventures, went into the memorabilia business with one of his lovers, and even was banned from baseball for a period because of an association with an Atlantic City casino, where he was paid simply to appear so guests could say they met Mantle.

It is in this context that Leavy met Mantle in 1983 for an interview that shattered her own image of Mantle. She unfolds this weekend encounter through the course of the book, from his gentlemanly effort to get her a sweater to keep her warm on the golf course, to his drunken efforts to pick her up that end with him slumping over asleep in her lap.

The book ends with Mantle experiencing a sort of redemption. Late in life, he began the work of facing his inner demons, including childhood incidents of sexual abuse that might have influenced his sexual proclivities. With serious liver problems looming, he checks into the Betty Ford Clinic and manages to stay sober for the rest of his life. He makes efforts to reconcile with his sons and make amends with others. He experiences what seems like a genuine death bed conversion as former teammate Bobby Richardson ministers to him.

I’m not sure Mantle really was the last boy. The image in part is one of America losing its illusions in the late Sixties. But the truth is that athletes continue to reach the peak of their physical powers long before they mature as people, and while they can perform on the field, they are unprepared for the hangers-on, the fast lifestyle, and the sudden affluence that comes their way. Like others with power, they often have no one to hold up a mirror to help them see their true selves, no one who will tell them what they do not want to hear. Certainly Mantle bore responsibility for this, and more and more toward the end of his life he acknowledged it. What the “last boy” title fails to capture is that our culture of adulation towards sports heroes still celebrates the physical gifts of youth while failing to affirm the character qualities of maturity that distinguish men and women from boys and girls. Perhaps the most tragic figure in this story is neither Mickey nor his boys, but Mutt, who pushed his boy to succeed, and only realized when he was dying that no one had prepared him to handle success. show less

Jane Leavy's Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy is a well-crafted biography of one of the most talented but least understood sports figures of the 20th century. Though handicapped by virtually no input from Koufax himself, Leavy, through extensive quotes and anecdotes from many of those around him over the years, still manages to shape a fairly vivid portrait of a very private man whose remarkable pitching prowess thrust him into baseball's spotlight.

The book's structure interweaves two threads, show more with chapters alternating between an inning-by-inning account of Koufax's 1965 perfect game pictched against the Chicago Cubs, and the chronicle of his life and ascendant baseball career. Leavy provides insight into the early struggles with his control, and the pain through which he pitched during the dominant final five years with the Dodgers. The author also explores the elements of Koufax's Jewish heritage: the occasional undercurrents of anti-Semitism; his decision to not pitch in Game 1 of the 1965 World Series because it fell on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year; how he broke stereotypes; and how he eternally embodied the pride of the Jewish community.

Leavy has a good feel for the nuances of baseball and the rhythm of the game, and she exhibits flashes of lyrical prose. Sandy Koufax's elusiveness remains at the core of his mystique. The epilogue puts his career in perspective, and hints at his life after baseball. The final paragraph beautifully tied it all together: a poignant and satisfying conclusion. show less

I think the most interesting thing about Jane Leavy's book is the play between Mickey Mantle, the real person, and Mickey Mantle, the hero, and how that play involves us, his admirers. Mantle was Jane Leavy's hero when she was a child. She is a year older than me, so I can relate to the time of her childhood. Mantle was everybody's hero. To us as kids, in the early 60s, he really was that "All American" character -- he had that big, innocent looking smile that just said everything was great! show more He played a game for a living, everybody loved him, and he was a winner. Even if you weren't a Yankees fan, you still loved Mantle. And on top of all the rest he had that storybook bashful modesty. Who wouldn't want to be Mickey Mantle?

Well, it turns out, Mickey Mantle probably didn't especially want to be Mickey Mantle. Leavy's title refers to "the end of America's childhood". We believed in Mickey, and that was pretty much what made Mickey. We believed he was that perfect hero, and we (his admirers, the press, his teammates, . . . . everyone who influenced his popular image) made him the perfect hero.

But of course, our belief was naive, especially so in Mickey's case. We're accustomed now to the fall of heroes -- we've been through Watergate, presidential infidelities, the OJ trial, Pete Rose's gambling, the Tiger Woods revelations, . . . . So, at the "end of America's childhood" Leavy, like the rest of us, is ready for the real Mickey Mantle. And Leavy presents him in full color -- his self-destructive alcoholism, his almost equally self-destructive disregard for his health in general, his paranoia about an early death, and maybe most of all his really astonishingly crude disrespect for women. Mantle has been described as a "sex addict", but that doesn't begin to tell the story of his verbal disrespect for virtually every woman in his life (there's no mention in Leavy's book of anything like violent abuse of women, except through his nonchalant sexual encounters and invasive attempts themselves). Mickey, by then deep into his declining years, even hit clumsily on Leavy as she interviewed him.

Leavy resists the temptation to over-analyze Mantle. It would be easy to do -- he's a sitting duck. His modesty seems to have been truly a matter of his thinking that he just wasn't anybody to be admired. He knew he wasn't Mickey Mantle the hero. And he reacted sometimes with loathing toward the public that admired him. Incidents in his childhood support common etiologies of adult sexual disturbances. But, in a way, I think Leavy gives the real Mickey the respect due someone who is at fault for many things, but probably not for the burden we put on him as the creators of Mickey the hero.

At the end, she likes him, just as most of the people in his life did. Even his wife, so thoroughly the victim of his infidelity and his array of humiliations, never wanted a divorce. To the end, she wanted to be "Mickey Mantle's wife." And the real Mickey had some tremendously positive virtues -- he had an anonymous, spontaneous generosity toward his friends and toward total strangers. He realized his influence, and he knew that just a word from him, from Mickey the hero, could mean so much to anyone struggling, anyone in need of a little confidence.

The most interesting part of the story of Mickey Mantle, I think, is how we (his admirers) made Mickey the hero out of Mickey the real person. Among those close to him, who knew the real person, it was almost a conspiracy -- rewriting the quotes to make him more articulate, withholding the truth about his sexual indiscretions and his alcoholism, painting him as even more heroic for playing through debilitating though self-inflicted pain. And those who didn't know him but admired him anyway, like us kids, no doubt turned a deaf ear to anything that would diminish him. We just wanted so badly to have someone we wanted to be. show less

Jane Leavy doesn’t write biographies without making a bigger point. This is both a biography of Babe Ruth and a story of the evolution of celebrity and fame in the early twentieth century.

She tells Ruth’s story through the course of a 21 day, coast-to-coast barnstorming tour Ruth and Lou Gehrig took after the Yankees’ 1927 World Series victory over the Pittsburgh Pirates. 1927 was also the year that Ruth hit his record 60 home runs, breaking his own record of 59, set 6 years earlier. show more He was at the height of his fame, and the height of his fans’ adoration.

Each stop along the way is given its own chapter, with an account of the festivities — at least one exhibition game pitting the Bustin’ Babes against the Larrupin’ Lous, with Ruth and Gehrig putting on home run shows and filling out their teams with local talent and friends. Every stop was a big event. Remember this was well before televised sports, so Ruth and Gehrig were mythological figures to the fans in so many of the places the tour stopped — midwestern towns like Omaha, Kansas City (which of course had no Major League team at the time), and Sioux City as well as west coast cities like San Diego, Los Angeles, San Jose, Oakland, and San Francisco. This was a rare chance for fans to see their idols up close, and they packed the small stadiums all along the tour.

Leavy weaves flashbacks into each stop, especially going back to Ruth’s childhood to show how his need for approval and just plain fun grew from his parents’ rejection, entrusting his development to what amounts to incarceration at St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys. He was left there by his parents at 7 years of age, and he stayed there with little interruption until he began his baseball career 12 years later. The boys at St. Mary’s referred to themselves as “inmates”, and Ruth was confined longer and with less family visitation than most of the others.

The one thing that St. Mary’s gave him (besides training in tailoring) was baseball — St. Mary’s was a hotbed for baseball, and Ruth found a father-figure/mentor there. Brother Matthias taught him about baseball, and he guided him through the conventional education that St. Mary’s could give him. Ruth was ready for professional baseball when he was discovered at St. Mary’s and signed with the minor league Baltimore Orioles, and then was quickly sold to the major league Boston Red Sox as a 19 year old pitcher.

The facts of Ruth’s career — his conversion to the outfield despite a few years as a dominating pitcher and then the revolution he brought to baseball as a power hitter for the Yankees — are well known.

It’s the evolution of Ruth as a celebrity that Leavy really brings to the party. In fact, as much as a biography of Ruth, this is a story about Ruth’s partnership with Christy Walsh, himself a revolutionary figure in the business of celebrity.

The 1920s, by Leavy’s account, became a new era of fame, enabled by new technologies — national radio networks, newsreels and movies, and wire services that could transmit photographs for newspaper publication across the country. Newspapers, with photographic layouts, proliferated especially in New York, with columns that went beyond the facts of athletes’ performances into their professional and personal lives.

Walsh saw the possibilities. He could, in effect, manufacture a Babe Ruth for the public — putting Babe Ruth’s private self on a public stage, but a private self of intentional design. That Babe Ruth would be the idol of kids, a hero to everyone, available for endorsements, events, fantastic stories, all orchestrated by Walsh as a business manager, something that baseball heroes had never had before.

One of the media that Walsh used to produce this private Babe Ruth was ghostwriting. Walsh himself wrote and employed writers to write columns under Ruth’s (and other celebrities’) names. The columns purportedly told the inside thoughts of Ruth (and the other celebrities), making them available for anyone to read in newspapers all across the country, through the Christy Walsh Syndicate beginning in 1921.

Walsh was a genius in his own right, even if a bit unscrupulous at times. In fact, the whole idea was a bit sketchy — the Ruth that Walsh helped produce was not the real Ruth. Ruth certainly had his virtues — he was fun-loving, likable in his way, and he certainly would go well out of his way to entertain kids. Ruth would do whatever he could to make a kid feel special — the connection to his own rejected, neglected childhood is almost too obvious to mention.

But he was also a heavy drinker, a philanderer, and about as self-indulgent as a man making a fortune playing a game could be. Check out Ruth’s stats for 1925 — suddenly the guy who flirted with a .400 batting average and had hit as many as 59 home runs in a season hit .290 with 25 home runs and played in only 98 games. It wasn’t because he pulled a hamstring — he had eaten, drank, smoked, and partied himself into the hospital.

It wasn’t so much that all of that was a secret. It was more that, with Walsh’s management, it wasn’t what was written and told about Ruth. The Ruth that Walsh (and Ruth himself) presented was a guy working out hard to get back into shape, doing roadwork, cutting wood, swearing off alcohol, and isolating himself on his farm with his family in Sudbury, Massachusetts.

Reading Leavy’s account of Walsh’s celebrity machine brings to mind things you see in later years — the newsreels, radio programs, and television programs that took us into celebrities’ living rooms, showing what solid family lives they had, quietly playing cards and listening to music. All a matter of image production that the fans ate up, even if they may have known, when it came down to it, that, no that’s not how Humphrey Bogart spent his evenings.

There’s a very poignant part to the story’s end. Leavy tells how Ruth, sick with the cancer that would soon kill him, attended the premiere of the movie The Babe Ruth Story, starring William Bendix as the Babe. The movie was far from factual. Leavy says, I imagine with some irony, that Ruth, under heavy medication, lasted only 20 minutes at the theatre and “didn’t know the movie was about him.” Well, you could argue it wasn’t.

I probably went on a little long here. Sorry about that. Leavy’s book is far from a dry telling of the facts — I hope my review conveys that. There may be more detailed autobiographies out there, and you could question her using the barnstorming tour as a way to tell Ruth’s story — sometimes the flashbacks feel a little awkward, and I found myself sometimes losing my orientation in time.

But Leavy tells a very good story, and she absolutely did her homework. There are over 100 pages of appendices and notes, detailing her sources, Ruth’s record on the field, and maybe most interestingly, details of the very successful financial partnership between Ruth and Walsh. Ruth and Walsh brought wealth to the baseball field, as well as modern fame. show less