The Last Boy

What American boy of a certain age didn’t want to be Mickey Mantle, the sublimely talented, golden-haired centerfielder of the New York Yankees in the 1950s and 60s?

Read The Last Boy, Jane Leavy’s recent biography of Mantle and you may ask another question – who would want to be him in the 1970s, 80s and 90s? He was not a very nice person – who knew their hero was an abusive roaring drunk and womanizer of mammoth proportions? He was enabled by sycophants around him that were unable to see the broken-down alcoholic he had become because they were blinded by the memory of what he once was. It is a sad, sobering, yet extremely compelling book to read.

The use of the word “boy” in the title is telling – Mantle went through his life unable to make adult decisions. The best decisions of his life came too late – he entered the Betty Ford Clinic and cleaned himself up at the same time he acquired the cancer that killed him at the age of 64. After his playing career ended he made his living by being Mickey Mantle – everyone it seems was happy to boast that they had bought a round for The Mick, and the baseball memorabilia business was fueled by people’s desire to own anything connected to Mantle. At his worst he would blow his nose into a Kleenex and give it someone as a collectible or sign obscene comments about the anatomy of little boys’ mothers onto baseballs. One diagnosis is that he suffered from “acquired situational narcissism,” and he was undone not so much by alcohol as by his celebrity.

Leavy digs deep, revealing complexities about Mantle: that he was a shame-filled bed wetter as a child, that he had been sexually abused and that he never had the ability to stand up to his emotionally controlling father. She did something like 500 interviews for the book, and, most significantly, draws on her own encounters interviewing a drunken Mantle in 1983. The book is meticulously researched and beautifully written.

She sees Mantle as much more than a baseball player, she sees him ultimately as a national icon. The subtitle of the book is “Mickey Mantle and the end of America’s Childhood.” As a baseball player he was proof of America’s promise, he was who everyone wanted to be, and in his own words, “what this country is all about” – a boy from the lead and zinc mining fields of Oklahoma who grew up to be … Mickey Mantle. His playing career ended in 1968, as tumultuous a year as exists in American history, a year of souring on the war in Vietnam, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, of race riots and finally the election of Richard Nixon. How many of us long for the days before 1968; before everything got complicated? And how many of us wish strapping heroes like Mickey Mantle could remain forever young?