Lefty Read online

  Copyright © 2012 by Vernona Gomez

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books,

  an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group,

  a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  BALLANTINE and colophon are registered

  trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  LIBRARAY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Gomez, Vernona.

  Lefty : an American odyssey /

  Vernona Gomez and Lawrence Goldstone.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-345-52650-2

  1. Gomez, Vernon, 1908–1989. 2. Baseball players—

  United States—Biography. 3. Pitchers (Baseball)—

  United States—Biography.

  I. Goldstone, Lawrence. II. Title.

  GV865.G59A3 2012

  796.357092—dc23 [B] 2012004000

  www.ballantinebooks.com

  Title page photograph of Lefty Gomez in 1937

  copyright © Bettman/Corbis

  Part title photographs on this page, this page, and this page

  from the Associated Press

  Photograph on this page copyright © 2011

  by Vernon Lefty Gomez LLC. All rights reserved

  v3.1

  For June and Lefty’s grandchildren:

  John, Andrew, Scott, Vernona Elizabeth,

  Jennifer, Serena, and Tiffany

  PREFACE

  Penning his biography would never have occurred to Lefty. When asked, he would reply, “Why would I write a book about my life? I lived it.” But in the 1950s, the literary seed was planted due to a chance encounter with two icons of the publishing world, Bennett Cerf, the co-founder of Random House, and James Michener, one of Cerf’s baseball-loving authors.

  While a mystery guest on the television show What’s My Line? Lefty met Cerf, one of the show’s panelists. He asked Lefty for his autograph as a surprise gift for one of his authors, James Michener. Upon receiving the autograph, Michener rang Lefty up, and a lifelong friendship began. Listening to Lefty’s tales, Michener would often chuckle and say, “The old West. The roaring East. Baseball. Broadway. That life of yours is the dream of every American boy.”

  In 1978, Lefty was on location for the filming of Centennial, Michener’s runaway bestseller about the American West, to say hello to Jim and the actors on the set. As Lefty explained: “Jim autographed a copy of his book to me, which is a treasure in my library. ‘To Lefty Gomez, from a writer who has always loved baseball and who often saw you pitch. Aloha, Jim Michener.’

  “Then Jim surprised me by saying, ‘Lefty. Let’s write your life story.’ But it was never to be, only for the fact that I couldn’t find the time to sit down with Jim and do that endless chatting that is so necessary for a book to come about. One day my daughter Vernona said, ‘Okay, Dad, I’m not Michener, but we bump into each other a lot. Let’s write that life of yours.’ And that’s how this book came to be.”

  Sixty years after Lefty first shook hands with Bennett Cerf on the set of What’s My Line? the seed planted by Michener blossomed in a New York conference room when Ballantine Books, a Random House affiliate, met with me and offered to publish Lefty: An American Odyssey. It has been a delight working on this project with them.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  PREFACE

  PROLOGUE

  PART 1

  AMERICA’S PASTIME

  FOR BAREFOOT BOYS”

  1. THE COWBOY’S SON

  2. “AN ABERRANT DEVIATION IN THE EVOLUTIONARY PROCESS”

  3. “PICK A SPOT, MAKE A DIAMOND”

  4. “I’D GO ANYWHERE TO PITCH”

  5. “ABOUT AS SKINNY AS YOU CAN GET AND STILL BE LIVING”

  6. “HIS NAME’S GOMEZ. GO WARM HIM UP”

  7. “I HAD TO STOP GOMEZ”

  8. PING, BABE, DUSTER, SLOPPY … AND LEFTY

  9. CLASS D BASEBALL SEVEN DAYS A WEEK

  10. BIRDLEGS AND WALTER THE GREAT

  11. A DEATH IN NEW YORK

  12. HOLLYWOOD, GOAT’S MILK, AND SPINACH

  PART 2

  WHAT DO YOU THINK OF

  MY BOY VERNON NOW?”

  13. “I DON’T TALK TO BUSHERS”

  14. THE DOCTOR AND THE DICTATOR

  15. JUNE IN JUNE

  16. A PITCHER’S PITCH

  17. “THE GREATEST THRILL OF MY CAREER”

  18. “NO LIPSTICK FOR LEFTY”

  19. PITZY AND FUNG

  20. GAME OF THE CENTURY

  21. FOR WANT OF AN INNING

  22. LET LOOSE TO RUN AROUND THE WORLD

  23. “THE YANKEES PAY YOU EVEN WHEN YOU LOSE?”

  24. “HE CAN’T HIT IT, IF I DON’T THROW IT”

  25. FAREWELL TO RODEO

  26. JUNE IN JANUARY … AND FEBRUARY

  27. THE NOT-SO-PERFECT CRIME

  28. IMMORTALITY, ACHIEVED AND DENIED

  29. “YOU DON’T TELL JUNE SHE CAN’T DO SOMETHING”

  30. “THEY’LL HAVE TO CUT THE UNIFORM OFF ME”

  31. EIGHTY INNINGS

  PART 3

  WHEN I MARRIED LEFTY,

  I MARRIED BASEBALL”

  32. “YOU COULD SEE IT WAS GONE”

  33. FIELD GENERAL

  34. “NEVER MEASURE A PLAYER WHEN HE’S GONE 0 FOR 4”

  35. “I ONLY DO WHAT I LIKE TO DO”

  36. “THE BEST POSSIBLE SPORTS EXPERIENCE FOR EVERY CHILD WHO HAS THE DESIRE TO PLAY”

  37. “MY OWN DAMN FAULT”

  38. WINNING FRIENDS AND INFLUENCING PEOPLE FOR THE UNITED STATES ON TEN DOLLARS A DAY

  39. “YOU DON’T HAVE TO SHOVEL RAIN”

  40. SOMETHING YOU CAN ONLY HOPE FOR

  41. DUANE

  42. “WE’RE GOING TO MISS LEFTY”

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Photo Insert

  About the Authors

  PROLOGUE

  On Saturday, August 4, 1962, 30,000 fans crowded into Candlestick Park in San Francisco to see the Giants defeat the Pittsburgh Pirates 6–5. The Giants were new to the city, one of two major league franchises from New York that had arrived in California in 1958, a century after professional baseball began. The Brooklyn Dodgers had also moved to the West Coast, settling in Los Angeles, 400 miles to the south.

  Large crowds were uncommon at Candlestick, an uncomfortable, hastily designed stadium known for violent, swirling winds. During the All-Star Game the year before, Stu Miller had been blown off the pitcher’s mound by a powerful gust and charged with a balk. Although the Giants would go on to win the 1962 National League pennant and then lose to the New York Yankees four games to three in a thrilling World Series, the team would average only 19,000 paying spectators per game. The reason 30,000 people had come out on this day was to see not the players of the present but those of the past. The Giants had chosen August 4 to stage their first-ever Old-Timers’ Game. To evoke the nostalgia crucial to the success of such an event, the three-inning contest would pit the old New York Giants against veterans of the San Francisco Seals of the Pacific Coast League.

  The Giants might have been storied in New York, but the Seals were the legends in San Francisco. Minor league baseball had grown with the city since 1903, through earthquake, depression, and wars, filling a series of intimate, rickety ballparks, and was a part of both the city’s heritage and its fabric. For California boys growing up in the 1920s and 1930s, the majors were as removed from their lives as if on another continent. With only sixteen big league teams, the farthest west 1,500 miles away in St. Louis, with no air travel or live broadcast media, the closest Depression-era Bay Area fans could come to the majors was through newspape
r accounts or radio re-creations read by local sportswriters off telegraph wires. And such was the quality of Pacific Coast League baseball that some players preferred remaining where they were to going east to play in the majors.

  The Seals themselves had been the most successful franchise in minor league history, and not all San Franciscans had been pleased to see the team fold after the 1957 season to make way for the New Yorkers. In its fifty-four-year history, the Seals had finished first in a highly competitive league on twelve occasions, all while sending a steady stream of star players to the majors. Six Seals alumni had been voted into the Hall of Fame, more than some major league franchises.

  Which is why, on August 4, 1962, desperate to fill some seats, the new San Francisco Giants chose to celebrate the team that it had displaced.

  The Seals’ starting outfield was a big reason the Candlestick stands were full. For the first time in their storied careers, the three DiMaggio brothers would play together: Dom in left, Vince in right, and, in center, the great Joe, “The Yankee Clipper,” perhaps the most complete player ever to don a uniform. The Seals’ starting pitcher would be another Hall of Famer and a local legend in his own right: Joe’s old Yankee roommate, Vernon “Lefty” Gomez.

  Joe DiMaggio, notoriously taciturn, was all smiles that day, posing for photographs flanked by Dom and Vince, bantering with the other players and—astoundingly—the assembled members of the press. But unbeknownst to those fans, reporters, fellow players, or his brothers, the source of Joe DiMaggio’s elation had nothing to do with the game or even the opportunity to play alongside Dom and Vince. Only two people in the stadium knew the truth: Lefty Gomez and Lefty’s wife, the former Broadway musical comedy star June O’Dea.

  Lefty had roomed with Joe from 1936, when Joe first broke in, until 1942, Lefty’s last year with the Yankees. Although Lefty was six years Joe’s senior, they shared common roots. Both had grown up poor in Northern California of immigrant stock—Joe’s father, Giuseppe, was a first-generation fisherman; Lefty’s father, Francisco, known to everyone as Coyote, was a second-generation cowboy. But where Joe was dour and almost painfully shy, Lefty was gregarious, at ease with people, and known for a stunning wit. When Joe got to the majors in 1936 at age twenty-two, Lefty took the young man under his wing and became not only Joe’s closest friend but also his most intimate confidant. Perhaps his only confidant. In fact, what was not widely known was that, despite the pictures in the newspapers of the three smiling brothers, Joe didn’t speak much to either Vince or Dom.

  But Joe told everything to Lefty.

  As the aging ballplayers milled about, pulling on uniforms that now bulged more in the waist than in the shoulders, Joe sought Lefty out.

  “There’s always a lot of noise in the locker room of an Old-Timers’ Game,” Lefty said. “Joe and I were sitting on the bench with the players around us, slapping each other on the back, happy to be together again. I hadn’t seen him for about three months. We both had tough traveling schedules, and to catch up I told him that after the game June and I were driving to L.A. to see Bing and Lou Russell. Joe knew Bing from ’36, when he and Buddy were down at St. Pete making a pilot out of me.” Bing and Lou Russell were the actor Kurt Russell’s father and mother. Buddy, Bing’s father, was a famous stunt pilot who had taught Lefty to fly.

  “ ‘For how long in Thousand Oaks?’ Joe asked.

  “ ‘I dunno. Till Bing throws us out.’

  “ ‘Lefty, Marilyn and I are getting remarried Wednesday. I want you and June there. Spend some time together.’

  “Joe was smiling a thousand watts, happier than he’d been for a long time. He still carried the torch. Crazy about her. Now he was saying whatever Marilyn wanted to do, even if it meant the movies, was okay as long as they were together.”

  The two couples had history. “Back in the fifties, when Joe and Marilyn were first married, June and I had gotten together with them over dinner at the Plaza and out at the ballparks. Marilyn and June talked showbiz. Joe and I talked baseball. Or let’s say, I talked and Joe listened. June thought Marilyn had so much acting talent and charisma that she’d be a natural on Broadway. Marilyn wanted to know all about the legends June had worked for, like Gershwin and George M. Cohan. So it was a good mix. We had fun.”

  In the game, Lefty pitched the first inning for the Seals, giving up a hit but no runs. Joe played all three innings without a hit. The other players razzed him about taking the collar, but Joe clearly had other things on his mind. Lefty and June stayed overnight in San Francisco, then left the next morning.

  “Driving to L.A., the news came over the radio that Marilyn had been found dead in her Brentwood home. An accidental overdose or suicide. June and I were stunned. How could it be suicide when Marilyn was getting married on Wednesday? And what about her talk of doing stage work in New York? We couldn’t believe that her death was a suicide and don’t to this day. I pulled into the nearest restaurant and called Joe.

  “ ‘What do you want me to do, Joe?’ I said.

  “ ‘Come and talk to me, Lefty, I want to talk,’ Joe told me.

  “Joe had flown first thing to L.A. and was at the Miramar Motel making the arrangements for the funeral. Marilyn’s sister was flying in from the East Coast. Together they decided on a private service at Westwood. No celebrities, no fanfare. About twenty-five people, counting her relatives and people working around her career like agents and accountants, and Lee Strasberg doing the eulogy.

  “Joe said, ‘No personalities. If one comes, they’ll all come. And I don’t want to see the bastards. If it wasn’t for them, she’d still be here.’

  “When we got to L.A., I went over to the Miramar and spoke with Joe for about two hours. June and I didn’t attend the funeral. Joe wanted it private, and it was important to us to do what he wanted. For the next eight to twelve months I called him about twice a week from wherever I was just to say hello.”

  Lefty paused.

  “That’s what roomies are for.”

  Lefty Gomez is both one of the best-known and one of the least-known stars in baseball history.

  To the public and press, he was “El Goofo,” a unique combination of high-velocity fastball, affable eccentricity, and irreverent wit; a free spirit and natural clown who was so relaxed on the mound that he paused during a World Series game to watch an airplane fly over the Polo Grounds. He was famous for a series of one-liners, such as “I’d rather be lucky than good,” or “The secret of my success is clean living and a fast outfield.” As anyone who read the newspapers knew, here was a bon vivant, a man who loved the nightlife; he was on New York’s best-dressed list and was married to a Broadway star. He played the saxophone well enough to sit in with the Jack Teagarden and Eddy Duchin bands and was sufficiently adept at stunt flying that he was specifically forbidden in his Yankee contract to attempt loop-the-loops.

  To the public, Lefty cruised through life, eliciting smiles and affectionate shakes of the head, well-placed in a boys’ game, someone to be amused by, certainly, but to be taken no more seriously than he seemed to take life.

  His friends and teammates, however, knew a far different person. And a more complex one. Lefty Gomez was widely considered the glue of the Yankee clubhouse throughout the 1930s and perhaps the most ferocious competitor on the team. Losses ate at him. His commitment to the Yankees was without equal. His manager, Joe McCarthy, once asked him to leave a hospital bed to pitch. Lefty did. He pitched hurt so often that he was forced to retire when he was only thirty-three. On the day he was told his mother had died of uterine cancer, he refused to beg off his scheduled start, went out and pitched a three-hit shutout, then sat weeping in the locker room after the game.

  To his teammates, he wasn’t even Lefty. Yankee teammates used that moniker when talking to the press, because that was how the public knew him, but inside the locker room he was Vernon. With the more serious name came a more serious role. Teammates confided in him and asked his advice. Not by accident was Lefty assi
gned to be Joe DiMaggio’s roommate when the most celebrated rookie in Yankee history joined the team in 1936. And it was Lefty who consoled Lou Gehrig in the dugout after the seemingly indestructible first baseman removed himself from the lineup on May 2, 1939, after 2,130 consecutive games.

  There was actually very little that was goofy about Vernon Gomez. His one-liners, while noteworthy, were only a scant reflection of deep insight and wry humor about both baseball and life, every bit the equal of Damon Runyon’s or Ring Lardner’s. He read voraciously, spoke knowledgeably of world events, and had almost total recall.

  Although he certainly ran with a sophisticated crowd in New York, he never really ceased being the small-town boy. Each off-season he drove home to spend the winter with family and to play baseball with the local kids. And five years before dapper Lefty Gomez made the best-dressed list, seventeen-year-old Vernon had left home to play semipro baseball with only one pair of pants to his name.

  When his career was done, cut short after only thirteen seasons, he embarked on a new vocation with Wilson Sporting Goods, less glamorous but far more profound. Logging 100,000 miles a year, Lefty touched thousands of lives, speaking not only of his love of baseball but of the importance of honesty, integrity, and effort.

  And then there is a brilliant record on the mound. Lefty pitched for the Yankees from 1930 to 1942, amassing a lifetime record of 189–102; he won 20 games four times, led the American League in strikeouts three times, three times in shutouts, and twice in earned run average. His World Series record is among the greatest ever. He started seven games, winning six and losing none with an earned run average of 2.86. Lefty was the starting and winning pitcher in the first All-Star game. He pitched in four more All-Star games, winning two and losing once, although the only run scored while he was on the mound came in on an error. He was elected to the Hall of Fame only in 1972 because the sportswriters who do the voting were deceived by the plethora of self-deprecating remarks for which Lefty was famous.