Jackie Robinson (58 page)

When the
Look
article, leaked by an employee, became public, sweetness vanished everywhere. Offended by Jack’s refusal to die quietly, O’Malley privately dismissed him as a mercenary and an ingrate—curious charges, given Jack’s record with the club. Earlier that year, O’Malley had told Roger Kahn that Robinson “
is always seeking publicity. Maybe it’s a speech
he’s about to make, or a sale at his store, but when Robinson gets his name in the headlines, you can be sure there’s a reason.” Angry at seeing his deal wrecked, Bavasi scorned the
Look
article as a ploy by Robinson to gouge more money out of the Giants. Robinson should have told him he was about to retire (Bavasi, apparently, had no obligation to tell Jack he was about to be traded): “
There would have been no deal and I would have kept it in confidence if he asked me to. I knew of the
Look
deal for two years and I kept that in confidence.”

Now it was Jack’s turn to be insulted. No amount of money, he stormed, would make him play baseball again after Bavasi accused him of greed. “
Million Dollars Won’t Change My Mind,” the
Daily Mirror
trumpeted: “Bitter Robinson Hits Bavasi for ‘Insult’ on Press Sellout.” Jack was quitting the game “because of Buzzie Bavasi’s unwarranted criticism in the press insulting my integrity. I am challenging those cracks and I intend to follow ’em up.” Meanwhile, it is clear, he made sure that Bill Black knew that he was committed to him. On January 10, Black wrote Jack to say that he was “
proud—very proud—to have you on my team.”

Facing writers upset by his secrecy, Robinson argued that his deal with
Look
was common knowledge among them; but several begged to disagree. “
Didn’t you lie to your friends?” one man asked. “I did not lie,” Jack replied. But some writers defended Robinson. After all, as one of them wrote in a Rhode Island paper, for an entire decade Jack had been “
the bell-cow of the Dodgers, and it was almost ridiculous the way reporters made for Robinson’s cubicle after the critical games. Others may have starred, but Robinson, all knew, was the one who talked.” Robinson was often succinct and brilliant, and he never hedged; always reliable and good copy, he deserved his windfall from
Look.

As for the Giants, they did not give up easily. On January 11, vice-president Charles S. “Chub” Feeney sent Jack a contract, as he was obliged to do by January 15 according to league rules, that would pay Jack $35,000 in 1957. But: “
If you decide to play,” Feeney wrote invitingly, “naturally financial terms will be open to discussion.” (The Associated Press reported that the Giants were ready to pay Jack $65,000 for the season—more than any Dodger ever earned, although less than salaries paid to such contemporaries as DiMaggio, Williams, Musial, Feller, and Ralph Kiner.) But three days later, on Chock Full o’ Nuts stationery, Robinson informed Stoneham that “
after due consideration I have decided to request to be placed on the voluntary retired list as I am going to devote my full time to the business opportunities that have been presented.” He assured Stoneham that his decision had “nothing to do with my trade to your organization.” Stoneham then concluded their exchange with a pleasant note,
handwritten, from Scottsdale, Arizona, wishing Jack success and happiness. However, he added, “
I can’t help thinking it would have been fun to have had you on our side for a year or two.”

Now Jack’s ten-year career in the major leagues and his eleven-year career in organized baseball were indeed over, although informal polls indicated that most fans across the city wanted him to continue playing, and although Rickey declared that Robinson had at least two good years left in him. The fighting over his
Look
contract clouded his exit, but not utterly. Many admirers, white and black, let him know that they understood the complex beast he had wrestled with for eleven years in the name of justice and baseball. Richie Ashburn of the Phillies assured Robinson that “
both on and off the field … your tangible and intangible qualities made you the greatest player I had ever had the pleasure of playing against.” Hank Greenberg, writing to praise “
your long and illustrious career” and the “exemplary manner in which you have conducted yourself—both on and off the field,” called Robinson “a credit to baseball and an inspiration” to youngsters “who will attempt to emulate your example.” Cincinnati’s Brooks Lawrence, a Negro National League pitcher who had become a major-league rookie at the age of twenty-nine in 1954, also paid tribute, but on behalf of a different group: “
You opened the door for me and others who followed you and when you opened it you threw it wide open. You gave to us a new way of life for which we will be eternally grateful.”

Not all the players felt the same way. Sal Maglie, only recently a Dodger, sneered that during the season Robinson had to be asked by Alston to play; Jack dismissed the remark as too ridiculous to answer. And Campanella took the lead in attacking Robinson, after the columnist Dick Young erroneously reported that Jack had declared the catcher washed up. (“
I have never made such a statement!” Robinson insisted at the Chicago airport en route to San Francisco; he had said only that the Dodgers were “understandably concerned” about Campanella’s hand following another operation.) “
When it’s my turn to bow out of baseball,” Campanella let everyone know, “I certainly don’t want to go out like he did. It just wasn’t a dignified way to do it.” Jack was always “shootin’ off his mouth about everybody—and most of the time he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He was always stirring up stuff like this in the clubhouse, too, making a lot of trouble.… Jackie should have left baseball with a lot of friends. Instead, he’s got a lot of enemies. Instead of being grateful to baseball, he’s criticizing it.”

The veteran black sportswriter A. S. “Doc” Young, writing in the Los Angeles
Sentinel,
caught something of the precise flavor of Campanella’s blast, and of the long feud between the two players: it “
combined the bitterness of the Hatfields & McCoys with the tragic comedy of Amos ’n’ Andy.”

As Jack made his exit, yet another controversy flared up to light his way out. After a small church dinner, he let his guard down and ventured the opinion that Milwaukee had lost the 1956 pennant because a few of its players had been out carousing late at night instead of conserving their strength. The Braves and other baseball people were livid; Jack himself admitted making the remark but acknowledged that he had never meant it for publication, and that it should never have been published.

On January 18, seizing on the valedictory moment, Jack’s friend Edward R. Murrow brought his popular live television show,
This Is Your Life,
to the house in Stamford to show America how Jackie Robinson now lived. America, watching the program, saw a graying but still potent lion at rest after his decade of labors, in a fairly opulent home that was tastefully decorated, shared with an attractive, assured wife and three happy children.

The children almost stole the show. “David,
who liked to talk,” Rachel remembered, “started to say something when he hadn’t been asked a question. Jackie Junior, always more cautious, clamped a hand over his mouth. And we were terrified that David was going to bite him, right there, on the air! He didn’t, but lots of people wrote in to say that was their favorite part of the whole program, because it reminded them of their own families.”

The program was a success: Robinson’s life seemed a very good life. In its typically manic style,
Variety,
the top magazine of the entertainment industry, praised his appearance: “
Robinson happens to be gifted with the gab as a sidebar to his erstwhile baseball virtuosity. The well-known popoff and long-time star of the Bums … is a hep and happy guy, with a happy menage. The big athlete has always known where he was going.”

One place the big athlete went, on a cold day in January, was out to Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, where he cleaned out his locker. A press photographer, seeking to capture the essence of this farewell to arms, caught the clubhouse cat looking on curiously as the onetime king gathered his things. Then, ten years after he had first walked nervously in, a black man breaking dangerously into the white world in search of a chance to show his talents, Robinson strode out of the Dodger clubhouse for the last time in his life.

O
NCE
R
ACHEL AND THE
three children got over the initial shock of Jack’s retirement from baseball, they quickly fastened on the sweetest dividend it would provide: an end to the rigid baseball schedule that had kept him between March and October a sometime presence at home. No one was more keenly aware of the demands of baseball in this respect than Robinson himself. “
I’ll be very glad when this baseball is over and we settle down as a family,” he had written to Rachel five years before. “I would rather not be away so much.” The children obviously needed him. “
When I would come home from a long trip,” he confessed to one writer, “it was just like a stranger coming into the house. I lost a lot of contact with my kids that way and now I want to recoup. I want to have meals with them like every other father.” To Rachel and their three children he was as lovingly committed as ever. “
His devotion to them borders on the pious,” one reporter noted. “His gentleness, from so powerful a person, is almost a shock.”

Although Rachel had built the house, Jack had quickly fallen in love with it and their life in small-town Connecticut. The front lawn, a magnet for children up and down the road, was large enough to serve as the neighborhood softball field. Disinclined to join in much housework, Jack nevertheless took for himself the task of keeping the lawn in fine shape. His style was to race his commercial farm tractor at dazzling speeds up and down the expanse, then retire into the house to gaze out on his handiwork—acres and
acres of shining green turf. In the summertime, the pond behind the house, to which the Robinsons added a strip of sandy beach, was a welcome respite from the heat. The family would picnic on its banks, and Jack and David, especially, loved to fish for sunnies, catfish, and small bass. The fall brought touch football games on the great lawn, and at Thanksgiving over the years an annual father-son football classic—Jack, Jack Gordon, and Chuck Williams against Jackie and David, Bradley, and Chuckie, with the females rooting on the sidelines. As winter came on, the pond was forbidden until Jack himself tested the ice (although he hated the cold and could not swim); then he would declare it officially open for winter games. From inside the warm house, where he often kept a fire going for his family’s return, Robinson took pleasure in watching the kids at play.

Golf was his passion, and he practiced everywhere. In the game room he installed a floor-to-ceiling net and used it as a driving range. He putted on the living-room carpet; he chipped shots delicately on the expanse of lawn. Next to the huge stone fireplace was a cozy club chair where he read his beloved newspapers and magazines, wrote notes and drafts of speeches, or napped. He wanted to be where his family could see him, sit with him, or, as Rachel said, “
give him a kiss as we passed by, or just watch him in peace.”

“
Jack was the sweetest man in the world,” his sister-in-law Brenda Williams recalled. “He was very family-oriented, just intense about family. If he loved you, there were no boundaries. He was very sharing with good things that happened to come his way, always looking out for you to be included. He was also a big kidder—he and I had a really special relationship, one I treasured.” They had one flash point of difference, but even there they remained friends. “I loved to argue politics with Jack,” she said. “I was a complete liberal; he was a man from the right. We had some vehement discussions, loud, boisterous. Rachel and Chuck usually stayed out of our way when the debates got really hot. But we always made up in the end.”

Willette Bailey, who lived with them during the week before returning to New York City on the weekends, was an important person in the home, from the time the Robinsons moved to Stamford until Rachel’s mother came from California. She was not a housekeeper or a governess or a babysitter but in a real way all of these and a member of the family, although in fact their employee. Jack and Rachel trusted her, and she did everything to maintain that trust. A beautician until she assumed this role, Willette herself knew the real reason she was there. She loved Rachel (“
a beautiful person”) and Jack (“a wonderful man”), “but I was with them for the children. It was nice. It was home.” With each of the three children she was able to establish a special bond, in part as a figure of authority, in part as an adult who was also a friend they would cherish for the rest of their lives.

All around the Robinson home were other growing families, all white, who formed a happy, moderately prosperous community that seemed to have banished racial prejudice. When the Robinsons arrived on the scene, one family had fled in terror; but that house had been snapped up by a genial CBS commentator, Harry Kramer, and his wife, whose younger son sometimes earned a little money baby-sitting for the Robinsons. Next door to the Robinsons was the Baco family (Mr. Baco owned the local gas station, on High Ridge Road), with eight children, for whom David became at one point a sort of den leader. Another friendly couple, Joe Mehan and his wife, had two boys themselves; the Dumbrowskis, also affable, had two boys. Directly across the street were the Joyces, with two sons and two daughters, including Christy Joyce, who for some years was Sharon’s closest friend. Also living nearby were the Kweskins, Sydney and Ethel and their two sons; Syd became the Robinsons’ trusted local attorney and close friend. In the summer, in addition,
the Robinsons were often guests of Richard and Andrea Simon, who threw huge parties at which Jack almost inevitably found himself the center of some warm discussion of politics or sports. “The Robinsons were a fine, talented family,” according to Joanna Simon, “and we were really fortunate to know them. They added something special to our lives. We were not there when they lived in our home but we got to know them well. My mother truly loved Rachel, and Rachel loved my mother, in spite of their differences in years and their other differences.” Her brother, Peter, one of Jackie Junior’s playmates, would recall Jack himself with special affection. “
My own father was sick for a long time, before he died when I was twelve, and he didn’t or couldn’t do some of the things with me that I wanted him to do as a father. I remember Jack being very kind to me personally. My first set of golf clubs—I remember him taking me all the way to New Jersey to buy it, because he wanted to get me a special deal. He was always kind to me.” Years later, a white neighbor, John Crosby, would recall the stories of Jackie Robinson’s alleged combativeness and declare: “
I never knew this Jackie Robinson at all. To us he was a shy, gentle giant of a man with an enchanting smile and huge hands that almost swallowed yours when he shook hands. He used to play softball with us and, even curbing his swing, could hardly refrain from knocking the ball clear out of Connecticut.”