New Mantle biography tells whole story

The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood, by Jane Leavy. HarperCollins, $27.99, 480 pp.

Jane Leavy's engrossing, if somewhat redundant, new book, "The Last Boy," is a fresh, thorough examination of Mickey Mantle's life. It also says much about the rest of us.

Fifteen years after Mantle's death and 46 years after his last good season, we still are fascinated by him. Leavy acknowledges that Mantle "collaborated on at least six different biographies," and that doesn't count David Falkner's absorbing 1995 book, "The Last Hero." Mantle still strikes a chord among Baby Boomers who, like Leavy - and, frankly, this reviewer - idolized the Yankees superstar who would have turned 79 Wednesday.

Maybe it is what she calls his "euphonious name" or his central-casting, middle-America good looks. Perhaps it is that he came along as television was getting popular and before society became so cynical (allowing him to be "the last boy").

Probably we find him so compelling because, even though he is an icon, we never will know how good he could have been had he not ripped up his 19-year-old knee on that rightfield drain in the 1951 World Series.

"That October afternoon was the last time Mantle set foot on a baseball field without pain," writes Leavy, a gifted writer and former reporter for The Washington Post.

To be sure, there is plenty of familiar territory covered here: Mantle being scouted by Tom Greenwade, Mantle being chewed out by his father, Mutt.

What sets this account apart is Leavy's exhaustively admirable reporting. She interviewed more than 500 people, including the nearly 70-year-old man who was a teenager the day he retrieved Mantle's "tape measure home run" ball from a Washington, D.C., back yard.

More important, she tracked down people who shed light on the greatest burden Mantle carried: that he was sexually abused as a child. Leavy makes a convincing case that many of his own excesses and abuses stemmed from that sad episode.

So Leavy's book is in part rehab for Mantle's image, after 15 years of the public remembering him as the regretful alcoholic, dying of cancer.

The author does not hide her subject's failings, describing how she cried after a drunken Mantle made a pass at her during a 1983 interview and passed out, his head landing in her lap. She also cites his greatness, and his goodness (Mantle invited a depressed Joe Pepitone to take a spare room in his New York apartment after a divorce and Pepitone stayed for a year). It is a complete, vivid picture of "The Last Boy."

About the only thing that remains unanswered is whether, on the subject of Mantle, this will be the last book.