Reviewed by: Mantle—The Best There Ever Was by Tony Castro Rob Sheinkopf Tony Castro. Mantle—The Best There Ever Was. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019. 239 pp. Cloth, $24.95. Since 1951 when Mickey Mantle came into the American consciousness, hundreds of books have been written detailing virtually every aspect of his life. Even more have been published since his death in August 1995, including three by Tony Castro. So much has been written about Mantle's legendary New York Yankees Hall of Fame career and his relationship with teammates Joe DiMaggio, Billy Martin, Roger Maris, and Whitey Ford. We've heard countless stories about his humble beginnings, about his relationship with his father, Mutt, and the influence he had on Mickey's development, his notorious womanizing and extra-marital affairs, his bout with alcoholism and his lewd behavior, his rehabilitation and recovery, and his heroic final chapter when he took responsibility for his failures in life and finally became the role model people wanted him to be as a ballplayer. Tony Castro's Mantle—The Best There Ever Was tells us so much of what we already know, which should not be surprising since Mickey Mantle has been dead for nearly a quarter of a century. So, what could possibly be new about Mickey Mantle? Castro introduces hundreds of interviews with former teammates, friends and family, and some newly released interviews from [End Page 130] Mickey's widow, Merlyn Mantle, that reveal an even more troubled, flawed character than we might wish to remember. The author's promise to Merlyn that he wouldn't publish their conversations until after her death (at age seventy-seven from Alzheimer's Disease), delayed our understanding of her reasons for staying in a marriage that seems to have obviously ended many years before. Revealing the interviews with Mickey's wife of forty-four years and providing first-hand accounts of conversations with his long-time friend, Mickey Mantle, Castro provides some new perspectives on a lifetime that has been dissected, analyzed, and studied to death for nearly seventy years. The many interviews and the author's accounts of personal conversations with Mickey Mantle gives readers new details and a fresh perspective of his well-documented, turbulent personal life. We learned that Mickey was sexually abused as a child by his half-sister, Anna Bea, and that he wet his bed until he was sixteen years old. And while we knew of his father's strict parenting and coaching, we learned troubling details about Lovell, his mother, and her dark side, even meanness toward her grandchildren. In fact, "Merlyn Mantle would go to her grave convinced that Mutt's overbearing fathering unchecked by Lovell's own detached manner left Mickey emotionally and psychologically traumatized, and unable to turn even to his loved ones for help" (44). Merlyn attributed Mickey's "affairs, his one-night stands, the crude and vulgar language he used around women when he drank" to the molestation from Anna Bea, a traumatic scarring that lasted him a lifetime (45). While engaged to Merlyn Johnson when he joined the Yankees in 1951, Mickey met the love of his life, Holly Brooke, a young divorced mother from New Jersey, with whom he would carry on a love affair even after his marriage to Merlyn later that year and throughout his baseball career. Many biographers over the years tried to interview Holly but were unable to locate her, and some concluded that she was no longer living. But Castro was finally able to find Holly through one of her nephews, and they established a decade-long friendship until her death in 2018 at age ninety-four. The conversations with Holly were invaluable in providing "an important missing link to Mantle from his rookie year," according to Castro (229). Holly apparently "was blessed with an incredible memory and a seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of New York in that golden age," and gave many new insights, including her memories and insights into Mantle's "friendship" with Joe DiMaggio. Her recollections of Mantle and DiMaggio's relationship are corroborated by Merlyn and by Greer Johnson, Mickey's companion for the final decade of his life, as well...
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Jun 16, 2020
Jose Antonio Martinez-Escudero + 3
Open Access
