Peter Golenbock, "The Mickey Mantle Novel" author: Mr. Media Interview, Part 2

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BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: It’s kind of that side of sports heroes that we sort of think is there, but we don’t usually hear about it or talk about it.

PETER GOLENBOCK: Without a doubt, and the other thing about Mickey, of course, is that when he retired at the end of the ’68 season, he was lost. The man was just lost, and so he lived until 1995, so from ’68 until ’95, he had to get up every morning and try to figure out, what in the world am I going to do today? He was not a very happy man. He was a fearful guy. I mean, he had a very tough childhood. His father was not a particularly nice guy or kind guy. Mickey’s father was very, very tough on him, especially even when he was a child. Baseball became something of a job, and even if Mickey didn’t want to spend the afternoon playing catch or hitting a ball, he really had no choice. This was something… And so

Mickey never, ever, felt that anything he ever did was good enough, and that was a large part of what really bothered him.

As far as I am concerned, the guy was the greatest ballplayer of the generation, from the ’50s and the early ’60s. And yet when you sat down and talked with him, you got the sense, really, that he really didn’t think very much of himself, that he was not impressed with what he did. He said, “Ahhh, I struck out 1,700 times, and I walked 1,800 times. You know, that’s eight years of doing nothing!”You know, that kind of thing. He was very, very modest in terms of how he thought of himself, and it was all part of him. And this book explains all of that.

ANDELMAN: Now, most, if not all, young boys that are interested in baseball probably have read, I want to think, is it the autobiography of Mickey Mantle? It’s a book that you read, and it’s about his life, and it tells about his father dying. How different is this book going to be from a book like that?

GOLENBOCK: Well, the basic facts of his life don’t change. You get a few extra girlfriends here and there that you’re not getting in that book, you know. You are getting some of the things that he saw when he got into the minor leagues when he was 17 and 18. He watched one of the players set up a date with the manager’s girlfriend and then the next day find himself shipped out of there. Learned a little lesson from that. These are stories that I have heard along the way, and it gives me an opportunity to tell them.

ANDELMAN: So, is this a roman a clef? It’s based in fact, but it’s fictional?

GOLENBOCK: Oh, it’s absolutely based in fact. Oh, absolutely.

ANDELMAN: Okay. How can the reader distinguish fact from fiction, or can they?

GOLENBOCK: Well, my answer is it’s a novel.

ANDELMAN: Okay.

GOLENBOCK: You can’t distinguish fact from fiction, unless you sit with me and you point to a particular incident and you say to me, “Is this true, or isn’t it?” And I might tell you -- and I might not.

ANDELMAN: Are your Mantle stories, are they largely from Mickey? Are they some you got from Billy over the years or other people?

GOLENBOCK: A lot of them are from Billy; a lot of them are from Bill Reedy, who was very close to Billy and Mickey both. He was around them an awful lot. And then I got a whole lot of them over the years. Joe Pepitone told me a whole lot of stories at a Cubs Fantasy Camp a bunch of years ago, and then when I did Dynasty, I interviewed every single one of his teammates, so I got all sorts of stories.

ANDELMAN: How is the man that the public thinks it knows and the actual man different?

GOLENBOCK: He was much more troubled than the actual public saw except right at the end. When Mickey finally knew he was dying, and he did an interview, for instance, with the St. Louis announcer, Bob Costas. He really showed his vulnerability there when he looked in the camera and he said, “You kids, don’t be like me.” That was really the real Mickey. At the end of his life, he was terribly saddened because he knew he could have lived a better life, he could have been better to his children, he could have been better to his family, and he was deeply sorry. And at the end of my book, he apologizes to all these people and asks for forgiveness, and he gets it.

ANDELMAN: Do you remember the last time you saw Mickey?

GOLENBOCK: I really don’t remember the last time I saw him. It was in his restaurant with Billy, so it had to be before ’89, because Billy died Christmas of ’89.

ANDELMAN: Did you ever think, before word got out about the book or since, that maybe it wasn’t the best idea?

GOLENBOCK: Never.

ANDELMAN: Okay. You still feel strongly, obviously.

GOLENBOCK: It is the best idea. When people want to know what this man was really like a hundred years from now, this book is what’s the book that is going to tell them what he was really like. And people, if they’re wise, are not going to think less of him for it.

ANDELMAN: I started to ask you before about the sex, and I am only curious because most, all of your books, I think, have been about sports. There hasn’t really been much in the way of sex. Was it difficult to start writing about that at this point in your career?

GOLENBOCK: No. Not once I set out to do what I set out to do, it wasn’t difficult at all. In fact, it was a hell of a lot of fun.

ANDELMAN: I can see that. Had you written fiction before?

GOLENBOCK: Never.

ANDELMAN: Anything that you learned?

GOLENBOCK: But I don’t treat this as fiction. That’s the funny thing. I treat it like it’s his autobiography, except that I’ve got certain facts and certain details. When I open up my little file drawer, it’s empty, so I’ve got to provide it, I’ve got to supply it.

ANDELMAN: And what do you say to his family members who maybe are not so thrilled about this? Some of whom you have probably met over the years.

GOLENBOCK: Well, they’ve never read it. That’s the funny thing. They are all upset because of what they read in The Daily News, and that upsets me tremendously. I had an hour conversation with Billy Joe Martin, and Billy Joe was all upset by what he read in The Daily News, and I told him, the daily news guy who wrote that thing told the publicist at Regan Books that he never read it. So pass judgment after you read it.

Don’t pass judgment based on what the guy who’s trying to get Judith Regan fired is writing in The Daily News.

ANDELMAN: How did you feel about being lumped into this category with O. J. Simpson and his book?

GOLENBOCK: Well, see, I have a funny philosophy, which is that under the First Amendment, a writer has a right to write anything. If O. J. wants to write his whatever that thing was, he’s got a right to do it, and I as a book buyer have a right to decide whether I want to buy it or whether not, and I think canceling these books is a disgrace. It’s a political solution. But once they decided to pay O. J. the money and have him do this book, I think they have some sort of obligation to publish the thing. You know, let the public decide. They’ll either go tromping off to the bookstore and buy the thing, or they won’t. I mean, it’s a very un-American thing not to publish a book. It goes against the Bill of Rights. It upsets me tremendously. Then, of course, when they did it to me, I was equally upset, though I had more than a sneaking suspicion that somebody else would pick it up, but just the notion that it might not get published because somebody has it out for somebody else is a very un-American thing.

ANDELMAN: In this day and age, it doesn’t seem possible to keep something out of print very long. I mean, there is always someone out there who seems willing to print it. Or now, you could have printed it yourself, for that matter, and with the amount of publicity it got, it probably would have worked out.

GOLENBOCK: Well, you know, a book costs $2.00 a copy to publish it. If my publisher says they are printing 250,000 books first printing, even if they are publishing 200,000 first printing, it still cost me $400,000. So I get 400 of my best friends to lend me $1,000, and I’ve got it.

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© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.