Jackie Robinson (50 page)

Nevertheless, on February 4, 1954, he tendered his resignation. Despite some pleasant memories, he knew now “
that there is no future for me in the company.” His duties were vague, he complained, “despite my willingness to work in whatever area you might assign. Projects which were once begun have long since been forgotten, so that I find myself assigned to individual tasks here and there but never to a job with continuing responsibilities.” He did not hide his genuine regret; even as he said goodbye, Jack made a despairing appeal for a more substantial job with the network, which he saw as his ideal employer after baseball. “Nothing would please me more than to find a future with the company,” he wrote; he was ready to “give up baseball should there be enough need for me at NBC now and were I certain that a future could be laid before me.”

His appeal failed. Jack’s resignation was accepted, although he would continue to work with the network from time to time in the coming years. Although his letter of resignation made no mention of Jim Crow, in 1954 it would have been difficult for a black man, even one with Jack’s celebrity, to act with authority in an organization almost entirely white. Jack’s part-time status also made it hard for him to be effective. But with NBC, as with other organizations, he was determined never to be a mere figurehead, no matter how generous his salary or prestigious the job.

About the same time, his hopes for another fling in Hollywood were dealt a hard blow when William J. Heineman, who had overseen
The Jackie Robinson Story
in 1950, responded negatively to the idea of a sequel to the movie. To the suggestion that Jack might star in a movie unrelated to his life, Heineman was equally cool. However, Jack received some consolation in connection with the screen world. Later that year, a court finally ruled in his suit against Jack Goldberg, the producer who in 1947 had signed a contract with Robinson that promised him $14,500 to make the motion picture
Courage.
After Jack testified about how he had languished in Los Angeles in
January 1948 at Goldberg’s request, while writers allegedly developed a treatment and a script, only to have the project fizzle, the court ruled in his favor and awarded him the sum of $14,500. Whether Jack ever received all, or indeed any, of this money is not clear.

A
T
D
ODGERTOWN IN
V
ERO
B
EACH
, a new manager, Walter Alston, as calm and unassuming as Charlie Dressen was brash and outspoken, awaited Jack and his teammates in training camp. Alston was a baseball journeyman. A former minor-league player in the Cardinal organization, he had followed Branch Rickey to the Dodger system as a farm club player and manager. In Nashua, St. Paul, and Montreal, Alston had helped develop at least fifteen of the current Dodgers, including every black player except Robinson. Campanella, in particular, had flourished under Alston, who once stunned the player by having him manage the Nashua team after Alston was tossed from a game (Campy won the game, with a pinch-hit home run by Newcombe). Robinson, hurt by the firing of Dressen, and calling for Pee Wee Reese as his replacement, was unmoved by such stories. When Alston was named, Jack had no choice but to accept him; but from the start he found the manager’s personality flat, his thinking sluggish compared with that of Dressen and Durocher, and his loyalty to management bordering on the slavish.

As Alston would recall later (after Robinson described him as the worst manager he had ever had), their relationship eventually became cordial; but in 1954 Jack tested his new manager by often showing up late for morning calisthenics. “
He had a way of finding somebody to stop and chat with,” Alston recalled. “After several days, I talked with him about it privately. He didn’t like being called on it, but he began to report with the others.” Jack also irked him, Alston wrote, by sometimes insolently talking to other players while the manager was addressing the club. But in a contest of wills with his manager, Jack was at a disadvantage. He was no longer, at thirty-five, the magnificent athlete he once had been. His legs hurt now, his knees ached, and the extra pounds clung tenaciously to his midriff. Nipping at his heels was a corps of younger players, notably the twenty-four-year-old Cuban star Sandy Amoros, who had led the league in hitting at Montreal the previous year with .353, including 23 home runs. Jack was the second-oldest star on the club; only Preacher Roe was older, at thirty-nine. (Campanella, Reese, and Billy Cox were thirty-three; Furillo, thirty-two; Hodges, thirty; Newcombe, twenty-nine.)

Moreover, Alston knew that Jack had lost the support of some of his teammates, and had antagonized O’Malley and Bavasi no matter how
politely they treated him. The low point of Jack’s relationship with O’Malley, until Robinson’s departure from the Dodgers, came when the owner not only summoned Robinson to his office in Miami for a dressing-down but also asked him to bring his wife along. Insisting on Rachel’s presence was a blunder. If O’Malley expected her to take his side against Jack, to help in disciplining her husband the prima donna—as O’Malley called Jack during the meeting—he was mistaken. Rachel respected O’Malley and admired his wife, Kay; but calling Jack a prima donna lit a fuse in her. “
I was pretty angry,” she said, “and I told him in no uncertain terms that the charge was ridiculous, that Jack had always put the club above his own interests, that he had always played hurt if he could play at all. I told him that the finest thing about Branch Rickey was not that he brought Jack into baseball but that once he brought him in, Rickey stuck by him. He didn’t snipe and carp at him, or allow others to attack him unfairly behind his back. Rickey backed Jack all the way.”

Jack’s eulogizing of Rickey in the July 1953 number of
Our Sports
widened the breach between himself and O’Malley. In particular, the article included an invidious, and inaccurate, comparison of the two men on the subject of money. Defending Rickey against an ancient libel that he was a cheapskate, Jack insisted that he was more generous than the new leaders in Brooklyn. They were “
a fine group of men,” but were paying him not “a cent more” than his last salary under Rickey. This charge angered O’Malley and Bavasi, who assured reporters that Jack’s current salary exceeded his last under Rickey by as much as a typical reporter’s annual pay. Feebly, Jack conceded that he now earned more than in 1950—but denied that the difference was equal to a reporter’s salary, which one source pegged at $6,500. In fact, the difference was probably $6,000; Bavasi’s point was valid.

If this error was the fault of a ghostwriter, as Jack claimed, he should have corrected it. If he was underpaid, as perhaps he was (along with most of the other Dodgers under both Rickey and O’Malley), not once had he complained publicly, much less held out for a higher salary, as Doby, Furillo, Branca, and Newcombe, for example, all had done at one time or another with their respective teams. There is also evidence that O’Malley sought to preserve a balanced view of Robinson. When in November Jack played three games in Mexico at the end of a barnstorming tour, and someone wrote O’Malley to praise Jack’s “actions,
his attitude, and his willingness of cooperation,” O’Malley replied scrupulously that “
over the years Jackie Robinson has been big league in every respect.” Only Robinson’s ghostwriters, agents, and promoters had caused concern “on occasion.”

Jack’s unhappiness with the Dodger management was not softened by conditions in Florida, where the black players continued to stay at the
“colored” Lord Calvert Hotel while the white Dodgers enjoyed air-conditioned, beachfront accommodations. In addition, Harold Parrott, the genial traveling secretary for years under Rickey, was gone; Lee Scott, his replacement, seemed less concerned with the griping of Negro players—as did O’Malley and Bavasi, compared with Rickey. On the road, the black players often had to search for a decent place to eat; once, they were reduced to buying a loaf of bread and slices of cold meat at a shop and eating in the streets. This was after white taxi drivers refused to pick them up and they were forced to lug their bags through the streets to a local black “hotel.” “
It was a dump,” a player recalled. “I wouldn’t have kept a dog there.”

Martin Stone, Jack’s manager, recalled trying to have an impromptu dinner with him at a Miami Beach hotel in the early 1950s. “
I remember Jack sighing when I suggested it, meaning that we should not try,” Stone said; “but I thought, Hey, I’m Jewish, this is Miami Beach, no problem! I called one hotel, very fashionable; I spoke to the manager, told him I wanted to bring Jackie Robinson. Silence. ‘Anything wrong?’ ‘I’m sorry, Marty, but we have a problem.’ I asked him if Sugar Ray Robinson hadn’t been there with Walter Winchell. ‘On the terrace,’ he tells me. I hang up on him. I called Grossinger’s, spoke to Paul, Jennie’s son. ‘Bring a black man here, Martin? I don’t know what the help would do.’ Now
he
hangs up on me! I tried several hotels and got nowhere. Finally I called a man named Walter Jacobs, who ran a hotel that the vaudeville people—Milton Berle, Sophie Tucker—liked. ‘Walt,’ I said, ‘I have a problem. I want to take Jackie Robinson to dinner, but nobody will have us!’ ‘Give me an hour, Marty,’ he says, ‘and then come over. I’ll see what I can do.’ We get there, and the crowd is huge! Photographers everywhere! Walt Jacobs took advantage of the situation, but we got our dinner.”

Rachel recalled her own first visit to a “white” Miami Beach nightclub: “
Walter Winchell had arranged it. He literally led the way, parted the waters, as Jack and I, Sugar Ray Robinson and his wife, followed him like sheep to his table. It was more tense than fun, but it was another barrier broken.”

When Rachel came down, usually with the children, Jack was happy. At the Lord Calvert, a haven for black notables visiting Miami, he proudly showed off his family, or slipped away with Rachel for long walks on the beach; on one stroll that year, he helped her dig up a huge piece of driftwood, which he later shipped north for conversion into a coffee table that she still owned forty years later. In March, he also traveled to Daytona Beach, the scene of their 1946 ordeal. This time, the local
Evening News
hailed the changes Robinson had wrought, “
his tremendous contribution to
this Nation by widening the racial basis of the sport which we call our national pastime.” Jack revisited Bethune-Cookman College for “
one of the biggest thrills I have ever had”: accepting an honorary degree along with Dr. Ralph Bunche, the winner of the 1950 Nobel Peace Prize for his heroic work of mediation in Palestine for the United Nations. Like Robinson, Bunche had been a star basketball player at UCLA; a brilliant student, he had then gone on to earn a doctorate in history at Harvard. Like most black Americans, Robinson was proud of Bunche, whose triumphs on the world stage would have been impossible with his own government. “
Perhaps the most thrilling event of the entire evening for me,” Jack wrote to Bunche, “was listening to your wonderful experiences.”

The South was still Jim Crow, but there and elsewhere Jack found some signs of change. In St. Louis, the Chase Hotel finally agreed to permit the black Dodgers to register, if they did not loiter in the lobby, or use the dining room, or swim in the pool. Jack resented these rules, but on April 27, alone among the blacks on the club, he signed the register at the Chase. (“
I’m not going to stay there,” Campanella declared. “If they didn’t want us before, they won’t get my business now.”) On the next trip to St. Louis, Jack approached Lee Scott and demanded to see the hotel manager. “
I want it understood that I’m coming in here just like all the other players,” Robinson told Scott. “If I want to have a visitor I’ll have one. If I want to eat in the dining room, that’s where I’ll go.” Scott then informed him that all barriers at the hotel were now down. Some time later, the other black players joined him at the Chase.

This breakthrough coincided almost precisely with the single most important event affecting racial segregation in the United States in this century: the decision of May 17 by the U.S. Supreme Court in
Brown
v.
The Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas
that “separate but equal” schools were a violation of the Constitution. That the Chase Hotel gave in before the Supreme Court ruled, and desegregated itself for a baseball team, suggests something about the deep significance of baseball, Rickey, and Robinson in the unfolding national drama about the passing of Jim Crow.

T
HE 1954 SEASON WAS
both the worst by a Dodger team since 1947 and, for Jack, the most fractious and painful of his major-league career. That year, he admitted, “
I lost my head more than I ever had in my eight years as a major leaguer.” In April, he had announced some lofty goals—to win the National League batting title and MVP award again. Another goal was to get closer to Ty Cobb’s record for stealing home (thirty-five times); Jack now had sixteen. For a while, he seemed on target with both objectives.
After he hit two singles, a double, and a home run in a game against Philadelphia, the New York
Post
saluted him: “
He ain’t what he used to be, that’s for sure, but Jackie Robinson can still make the wheels go ’round on occasion.” On April 23, Jack stole home on a triple steal, with Amoros and Hodges, in a game against the Pirates that Brooklyn won by one run. In April, he hit .368; in May, .345; in June, .351. Then his season changed. In July, he hit only .211, and struggled as almost never before. In August he recovered, to bat .342. Then he slumped again, even as an assortment of injuries to his legs, ankles, and heels limited his at-bats. Ending the season above .300, he nevertheless drove in far fewer runs and stole far fewer bases than ever before in his career.

But for Jack, his growing notoriety was the main disappointment. Early in June, one of the most serious incidents of his career, at least as it affected his image in the white press and among fans, left him upset. With the Dodgers in Milwaukee to play the Braves, a bitter rivalry enveloped the two teams, not least of all because of a succession of Brooklyn wins in County Stadium. In the current series, one maniacal fan had been caught with a mirror trying to blind Russ Meyer, now a Brooklyn pitcher. Fans drenched Dodger fielders with paper cups full of beer, which was cheap in Milwaukee; the rival pitchers, especially Lew Burdette of the Braves, seemed on the brink of a beaning war.