The
schizophrenic quality of Mickey Mantle's life is made powerfully manifest
throughout Jane Leavy's exhaustively researched, delightfully readable
biography. Right from the start, Mantle's enormous athletic potential was
bundled with his debilitating psychological and physical problems. Leavy not
only wrestles with the maddening contradictions of the man himself but also the
carefully-constructed myth of Mantle: that the Yankee slugger, by pure
willpower, transcended humble beginnings and a lifetime of physical pain to
become an American icon. But she keeps her eye on more than the facts of her
subject's life, recognizing that fans and writers (herself included) have "invent[ed]
a kinder, warmer, bigger Mick, the Mick [we] wanted him to be."
Mantle's distant father,
like several Mantles, died young, leaving Mickey a sense of abandonment and a
fatalistic streak. Once his ballplaying career took off, he found himself
saddled with excruciating pain from multiple on-the-field injuries. Despite
these physical and psychological problems, his wounds were largely cloaked—the
press and public celebrated Mantle as a shimmering example of American manhood.
As Yankee wife Lucille McDougald tells Leavy, "Who wouldn't hop into bed
with him?" Married with children, Mantle loved the nightlife, drinking and
chasing beautiful women (or in Mantle's case, being chased). Much like his
battle-scarred knees, his liver and his marriage almost collapsed under the
exertion.
Leavy interviewed everyone
close to Mantle. The slugger's hyper-forgiving wife, Meryl, tells Leavy that "[h]e
thought no one ever loved him." The
Last Boy's most telling revelation may be in Mantle's sexual abuse as a
boy, a trauma which made him largely incapable of trusting others. When Leavy
interviewed the retired Mantle, he was drunk and made a pass at her. She also
watched Mantle telling numerous dirty jokes and off-color anecdotes. The
tragedy Leavy exposes is that Mantle only confronted his present problems, and damaged
childhood at the end of his life. If we like our heroes because of, not in
spite of, their frailties, then Mickey Mantle may be the greatest hero of all.
Leavy gives us Mick, not necessarily as fans have wanted to see him, but still
glorious in all his self-destructive, splendid complexity.
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