Jackie Robinson (55 page)

The charms of the locker room had also worn thin. Jack thought of his home in Stamford and had a hard time picturing some of his teammates there. “
The fellows are all very nice,” he wrote Rachel once, but “actually there are only a very few that I would like to socialize with.” Sometimes he became “real disgusted with the attitude and actions” of his teammates. “I cannot for the life of me understand,” he informed her, “why they use the floors of the clubhouse for a spittoon. It makes you wonder about their home life.” Among his white teammates, whom he saw only sparingly outside baseball, Jack liked and admired Hodges, Branca (no longer a Dodger but still a friend), Erskine (perhaps “the most refined of the bunch”), Labine (“also very intelligent”), and Reese (“a fine team man”). But with several other white players he had little in common. As for the blacks—they were “really nice but I don’t believe would make an evening very
entertaining.” Often fastidious about morals and manners, Jack detested womanizing and deplored sloppy personal habits. Overhearing a teammate telephone home, “
I had to laugh to myself the other morning,” he wrote Rachel. “He said hello and his wife asked who it was.” The fellow spoke poorly but would not take the trouble to learn (“But he is really a nice kid,” Jack continued. “I’ll not say more about the others.”).

He took pride in spanning the social and intellectual divide. Curiously warm to his fellow Dodger Billy Loes, who seemed interested mainly in cards and sex and little else, Jack was also proud of his more intellectual friends, including journalists like Edward R. Murrow, Roger Kahn, and Ed Sullivan, and the bridge master Charles Goren. Although he read few books, they did not intimidate him as they surely did many of his teammates, and Jack had grown adept at composing lucid little essays and speeches to reflect his simple but strong ideas about social justice. Not many professional athletes could claim the same interest or ability, or share Jack’s sense of accomplishment in, for example, contributing an essay, “Free Minds and Hearts at Work,” to Edward R. Murrow’s 1952 volume
This I Believe: The Living Philosophies of One Hundred Thoughtful Men and Women in All Walks of Life.

If one teammate, above all others, tested him, it was Campanella. As the Pittsburgh
Courier
once intimated, Jack may well have become envious of Campanella’s spectacular success in baseball. (Coming back from a dismal season, in 1955 Campy won the MVP award in the National League for the third time.) Tension between the two men dated back at least to their barnstorming tour of 1949, when Campy discovered that Jack was earning more than he was. By 1955, the teammates had become estranged. That spring, when Campanella allegedly ridiculed Robinson to a visiting stranger, Robinson angrily appealed to Bavasi in order to avoid confronting Campanella. Little about his teammate off the field pleased Robinson, from Campanella’s thriving liquor store in Harlem to his alleged weakness for women. (According to Martin Stone, “
one major reason Jack wanted to quit baseball had to do with women. ‘You know,’ he told me, ‘When I go out on the road, all these women are after me. I’m not interested in them. Get me something, I can’t go on this way.’ ” To the Baltimore
Afro-American
writer Sam Lacy, Jack had “
a cleanliness to his character that I admired. I remember once in the early days we were playing cards in a hotel room in Miami, and somebody brought two white women in and Jackie just got up and left right away. I suppose that was just his nature.”)

Robinson was sure that Campy begrudged him his greater fame. Lacy agreed: “Campanella resented Jackie. I think it was mainly because Jackie was dark black, or smooth black, and Campy had the swarthy Italian
complexion. Whenever there was a group of [black] people who came to circle around us, they always went to Jackie. They’d run past Campanella, and I think he resented it. Jackie was a symbol, Campanella was a maverick, a hybrid. They went to Jackie, because he was theirs. Campanella was marginal, because of his name and skin color.” Indeed, this factor probably contributed to Rickey’s choice of Robinson over Campanella, who was at least as gifted a player. Robinson, with his college career, his Army commission, his record of protesting Jim Crow, and his jet-black skin, was probably far more Rickey’s idea of what the first Negro player should look like—and what he thought black Americans would want the first to look like—than Campanella. In any event, laboring under such unfair pressures, the two stars came to resent one another. “
It seems Campy has a girl here,” Jack wrote Rachel once, after the catcher and Junior Gilliam almost came to blows, “and the fellows keep kidding him about her and it has gotten under his skin.… Camp is always kidding the other guys but can’t take it himself. I am sure one of these days there is going to be some trouble. Thank God I am not getting involved. The more you see of Camp the less you like him. To me he’s like a snake ready to strike at the best possible moment. Of course I am ready but am avoiding any fracas.”

To Campy’s son, Roy Campanella II (a student at Harvard College in the late 1960s, and a militant intellectual about whom Robinson would write admiringly), his father certainly detested racism as much as Robinson did. “
Jackie Robinson was a bright, highly sensitive man,” he said, “whose every fiber worked all the time in his outrage at the monumental injustices that black people faced because of the color of their skin. But it was more important to Dad to neutralize the rage, to turn bitterness into a productive and enjoyable life. Dad was always saying to me, ‘Let’s go fishing’ or ‘Let’s go to the ballpark,’ and I know that he was trying then to instill in me the idea that life was to be enjoyed no matter what happened. He always tried to be upbeat, and his motto in dealing with the injustices of the world was that living well was the best revenge. But he, too, felt the injustices keenly. You can be sure of that.”

Careful also to avoid “any fracas” with the press, Jack bit his tongue in March when Dick Young wrote provokingly that Alston was playing Robinson and Jackson at third base, rather than young Don Zimmer, because the club had to justify their large salaries. Furious, Jack was careful not to explode. “
I resented Dick Young’s column but didn’t say anything to him,” he let Rachel know. “He probably noticed my coolness when he talked with me but nothing was said.… I did not mind him praising Don but did resent the reflections he cast as far as I am concerned. Say I am a lousy ball player but not that my salary keeps me on the job. As I said
before let him write and if I can keep my weight and feel as I do now nobody will stop me.”

Throughout the spring, his main relief from the sweat and strain of the hot days and the boredom and emptiness of the evenings and nights was the thought of his home in Connecticut, and especially Rachel there. In his letters, Jack’s yearning for her had an unmistakably plaintive edge. “My Darling,
I can’t tell you how much talking with you eases my loneliness,” he wrote once.

The 1956 season, Robinson’s last, was both another triumph (Brooklyn’s sixth pennant in his ten years with the team) and a sometimes somber, even depressing experience that hastened his departure from the game.

Hovering over the season was the specter of the demise of major-league baseball in Brooklyn. In 1950, Walter O’Malley had faced squarely the reality that Ebbets Field was, on the one hand, charming and saturated with nostalgia and, on the other, cramped, obsolete, and decrepit. The Dodgers were both the most lucrative franchise in the majors and the most threatened, as the repopulation of the borough by new immigrant communities was changing the peculiar culture that had long nourished the team. Shrewd and imaginative, O’Malley also faced political leaders and officials unwilling or unable to face either these facts or his own steely determination to do what he thought was best for himself and his family. “
My father didn’t want to leave Brooklyn,” Peter O’Malley, who would succeed his father as president in 1970, said. “He wanted to build a ballpark in Brooklyn. He had a site, Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues, that he believed in. But he was not allowed to do it.” In 1952, at Walter O’Malley’s behest, the architect Norman Bel Geddes designed a domed stadium for the site. After that idea was met with general ridicule, the Dodgers president sold Ebbets Field to a real-estate developer, who then leased the ballpark back to the
Dodgers on a five-year contract. In 1955, another O’Malley plan for a domed stadium, to be designed by the architect and visionary Buckminster Fuller, also elicited mainly scorn. In August of that year, the Dodgers announced that the team would play twenty “home” games, over a three-year period, in vacant Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City.

When the Dodgers opened their season on April 19, 1956, at Roosevelt Stadium, Robinson had come full circle; this was the scene of his grand debut as a Montreal Royal almost exactly ten years before. Then, on a sunny day in 1946, before an overflowing park, he had exploded the myth of Negro physical and mental inferiority in baseball. But this circle was not a harmony. Whereas more than twenty-five thousand people had watched that game in 1946, now only twelve thousand fans paid to view the opener in 1956, although the Dodgers were world champions. In 1946, the crowd had been respectful as it watched a black man, against the odds, break the color line; now, in 1956, many fans were openly hostile to Robinson although he was nominally playing at “home.”

Stirring their anger were reports that Robinson had called Jersey City unworthy of a major-league team even on an interim basis; a fielding error charged to him only intensified the booing. He was clearly hurt and mystified by the response. “
The way they acted,” he said angrily about his error and the fans, “you’d think I did it on purpose.” Pressed by reporters to explain his remark about Jersey City, Robinson grew more and more testy. Then, when Ed Brennan, a reporter with the local Jersey
Journal,
asked fatuously why he could not act like a gentleman, Jack exploded. A Dodger publicity man stopped him, allegedly, from going after Brennan. But Robinson’s remarks about Jersey City had also angered his general manager. “
Robinson doesn’t have to worry about playing in Jersey City three more years,” Bavasi snapped. “With the kind of playing he’s been doing recently, he had better worry about the next three months.”

The hostile reaction of Jersey City fans continued. A local bar owner, Jimmy Gallagher, explained that the town had been a Giants stronghold for thirteen years; besides, Robinson, great ballplayer that he was, “
seems to have a gift for getting people riled up.” Another factor, difficult to gauge, was perhaps the ethnic composition of the Jersey City audience, which probably included a far smaller percentage of Jews and blacks, Jack’s most loyal supporters, than in Brooklyn. In any event, “it’s the fans’ privilege to boo,” he conceded wearily to a writer. “I’m here to play ball, and if they want to come to the ball park to boo, that’s their business. No ball player likes to be booed, but I’d be foolish to let it bother me.”

On April 25, for the nineteenth and last time in a regular season in the majors, Jack stole home, against the Giants at the Polo Grounds. By
mid-June, however, kept out by Alston in favor of Randy Jackson, he rode the bench and brooded on the dilemma he had become: Alston would not play him unless he looked sharp, but—especially at his age, thirty-seven—he could not be sharp unless he played consistently. Dangerously, he now and then flashed his rage against Alston for others to see. “
I don’t think the Dodgers would keep me at the salary they’re paying me if they intended me to ride the bench,” he told a reporter (a curious echo of an approach he had condemned when Dick Young expressed it). But more often he kept busy and hoped to catch Alston’s eye. “
I like Jack’s attitude,” Alston commented to the press. “He’s been working hard, keeping in shape and I like the way he peps up the bench.”

Sulking and silence were not Jack’s way; by instinct, he remained a peppery, driving presence on the club even when he rode the bench. In July, he clashed once again with Warren Giles, the league president. Behind this new dispute was an incident in a game against Cincinnati, when Robinson and the umpire Augie Donatelli disagreed on a call. At bat, Robinson claimed he had foul-tipped a ball onto his toe; Donatelli ruled the ball fair (with Robinson thrown out at first base). When Jack threw down his batting helmet in disgust, Donatelli ejected him from the game. Later, to Jack’s astonishment, Giles fined Robinson fifty dollars for making unspecified “remarks.” Robinson was furious. “
I’m fined for remarks?” he asked. “What remarks? I didn’t swear. I didn’t curse, except for maybe ‘damn.’ … If Donatelli says I swore he’s a liar, but I don’t think he did.” To Jack, and some other observers, the fine was out of line; Billy Bruton of the Braves, for example, was fined the same amount for the far more serious offense of fighting with another player.

Unquestionably, racism played a role in such incidents; no supporter of racial integration or black players, Giles and many baseball administrators quietly detested a defiant Negro like Jack and sought ways to squash him. Jack, on the other hand, also brought to the ballpark in the summer of 1956 something that should have been irrelevant but was inescapable for a black man struggling in a white-dominated milieu: a keen awareness of the epidemic of violence aimed at blacks and white liberals in the South because of the civil rights movement. In communities across the South, blacks following the lead of Dr. King and his Montgomery bus boycott were arrested and jailed by local police, or subject to other random acts of brutality by whites. While some school districts complied with the Supreme Court ruling of 1954 on integration, in many places white mobs barred an end to Jim Crow. After Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia called for “massive resistance” to integration, more than one hundred Southern congressmen signed a manifesto supporting segregated schools, even as the reactionary White
Citizens Councils reached a membership of over three hundred thousand persons. Autherine Lucy, a young black woman, was admitted to the University of Alabama by court decree, but removed in the face of white rioting and then expelled when she sued to be readmitted. In Birmingham, Alabama, the respected singer and pianist Nat “King” Cole was attacked on stage by a group of whites.