Why Was Mel Allen Fired?

In April, The Lyons Press released my new book, "The Voice:  Mel Allen's Untold Story."  So far, so good:  the book recently entered a second printing.  It etches the rise, ruin, and recovery of baseball's ultimate broadcast celebrity: a man who had all, lost all, and incredibly, came back.

  For a quarter-century, Allen defined sports radio/television:  the World Series, All-Star Game, Rose Bowl, Movietone Newsreels, and other marquee events.  Variety Magazine called his among "the world's 25 most recognizable voices."  Mel's gold standard was the Yankees. He became their Voice in 1940.  In 1964, he was fired, at 51, at Allen's peak as an institution.

Long-time New York Post columnist Maury (no relation) Allen observes that "no topic lured more mail than why the Yankees fired Mel."  The Voice spent the next decade a non-person, revived by TV's landmark 1976-96 "This Week In Baseball."  Mine is the first book to explain sportscasting's most mysterious dismissal.

The Firing -- And The Rumors

In fall 1964, Allen expected the Yankees to extend his contract.  Instead, in December they released him without even an announcement, ignoring Mel's honor, chary tenderness, and reluctance to offend.  To America, Allen vanished overnight, ceasing to exist, for reasons he never grasped not understood.  "The Yankees never held a press conference," he said. "They left people to believe whatever they wanted -- and people believed the worst."  Lacking any "[explanation]," Sports Illustrated wrote,  "Allen became a victim of rumors.  It was as if he had leprosy."

A writer told him to publicly deny the scuttlebutt. “The gossip’s not in print,” Mel replied. “There’s nothing to reply to.”  One fiction was being ***: a then-career-killer.  Even in 1957, Allen had felt obliged to apologize for being single. “It has created problems and situations, some of which he finds distasteful,” wrote Leonard Shecter. “He doesn’t think it’s a proper concern for the public prints. Still, he is forced to talk.” It wasn’t just Mel's mother who wanted him to wed. “Everybody in the family seems to spend most of their waking hours trying to marry me off,” said Allen. “I think I must be getting to the point where most girls would consider me too old ... for anything except a rocking chair.”

Nothing suggests that Mel was homosexual. “Just a Mama’s boy,” said Stan Isaacs. “She wanted him to get married, just to no one in particular”: At any rate, sex would not have affected him on-air. Allen blamed his salary. “That theory doesn’t hold water,” the Post wrote, “because [successor Joe] Garagiola did not come cheap.” Brother Larry cited Mel’s last statistician. “Bill Kane had a limp, played it for sympathy, and would make all sorts of mistakes,” earning a flick of Allen’s scorecard. “He started calling Mel a tyrant, saying he beat him. Just ridiculous.  It all played a role.”

Other prattle named disease or heroin. “That doesn’t make sense,” Leonard Koppett noted. “Each’s effect would be obvious, debilitating.” Broadcaster Merle Harmon had several 1990s mini-strokes. “They cause a short-term memory loss. On occasion I’ll forget my kids’ names for several minutes.” Merle’s doctor called it hard “to retain anything. That’s how it may have been for Allen.” 

Mel and I often spoke by phone or in person: He was lucid, then errant, like his last several years of Yanks radio/TV. “This argues against strokes,” a physician said. “The patient’s behavior doesn’t vary.” Another suspect was less déclassé in Mel’s than in our politically lockstep time. Peter O’Toole played “My Favorite Year”’s boozy actor Alan Swann. “With Swannie,” declared an admirer, “you forgive a lot, you know?” It is said that theYankes forgave, too.

“You can’t name one time he got loaded,” ex-partner Jerry Coleman dissented, angrily. “That’s garbage.” New York Times columnist George Vecsey recalls Mel at Yankee Stadium's bar “with a couple beers. Possibly he’d overdo it, not much.” By the 1980s, “Maybe he’d nurse a glass of wine for an entire hour,” said “This Week In Baseball” executive producer Geoff Belinfante. “That was it. I don’t think he had a problem.”

Isaacs fingered the mental, not chemical. “In the end he often couldn’t relate in-depth to people. The Yanks wanted him to get some help. He wouldn’t, a macho thing.” Maury Allen cites September 8, 1964: Bloomington, Minnesota. The press room fills before a game. In one corner, general manager Ralph Houk and a Twins attendant kibitz. In another, The Voice -- “his big voice starts booming, it’s loud, it dominates” -- recalls Murderers Row.

Disgusted, Houk shouts an obscenity, walks out, and phones owner Dan Topping. “He’d had it,” said Maury. “Mel was gone. Ralph won’t talk about it, even now.” Others have.

Enter Dr. Feelgood

One day The Voice took ill at Detroit’s Cadillac Hotel. Treating him, Tigers team physician Russell Wright thought that Mel had more pills in his bathroom “than I have in my doctor’s bag.” Later, Mel's Indians partner Harry Jones told the Red Sox' Joe Castiglione, “He was a hypochondriac. One pill after another.”

Garagiola cracked, “Mel has so many things going for him, if he ever got the flu he’d be a one-man Depression.” In 1962, Bud Blattner, Dizzy Dean’s ex-CBS TV colleague, joined the expansion Angels. “Mel’d take a pill to get up, a pill to fall asleep. He’d do a game, jet somewhere for an ad, then tape a Movietone newsreel. ‘Jesus Christ,’ I’d say, ‘You don’t need this. Slow down.’ He wouldn’t.”

That July the White Sox radio team got to gabbing at The Stadium. “Mel’d stand there, the World Series himself, with that dramatic voice,” said Milo Hamilton. “The strange thing is he didn’t act like he knew us.” Allen stared across the field, “like he was in another place.” Milo whispered, “Gee, Bob [Elson], is that the great Mel Allen?”

Lon Simmons did 1962 NBC Series Radio. “He felt Mel was spaced out,” ESPN's Jon Miller added, “didn’t hear a word when Lon spoke to him off-air.” Casey Stengel would meander in “a dozen directions, but never lose his point,” said Maury Allen. Mel would. “I don’t think there’s any question that in the end he was on something. It was hard to have a conversation -- almost an airy sense.”

The Voice's personal doctor was Max Jacobson, "known to his New York society clients as Dr. Feelgood," wrote Newsweek's Evan Thomas.  Jacobson treated actors, singers, and President John F. Kennedy:  to nurse Ruth Mosse, “a quack ... out of his mind ... a butcher,” often seeing 30 patients daily, including Mickey Mantle in September 1961.  The Switcher had a virus.  Allen told him: “My doctor's wonderful, the best there is.” Jacobson’s shot then struck Mick’s hip bone. Mosse might have warned them: “When he gave an injection he would just spill the contents of his medical bag on the table and rummage around amid a jumble of unmarked bottles and nameless chemicals until he found what he was looking for.” He would then inject himself, spilling “blood all over his whites.”

The patient-physician axis hangs on trust. “You depend on a doctor to prescribe,” said Maury. “What happens when he misprescribes: worse, when he’s crazy? You can get hooked on pills without knowing it.” Reason exists to think Mel did.

After 43 Years, The Reason Revealed

In 1960, Jacobson began treating then-candidate Kennedy’s injured back. Next year he injected the now-President in Washington, Palm Beach, Paris, Vienna, and later Berlin. “I feel much better,” Kennedy said after a shot. By mid-1961, wrote C. David Heymann, the President and First Lady had “developed a strong dependence on amphetamines,” synthesized as early as 1887, popular by the 1950s, later known as “speed,” and finally curbed by Federal law.

In his book, "President Kennedy," journalist Richard Reeves relates Jacobson prescribing a strange mix of amphetamines, vitamins, and human placenta.
“You don’t know what’s in that,” said Attorney General Robert Kennedy.  “I don’t care if it’s horse ****,” said his older brother. “It works.”

PBS Television’s “A Presidency Revealed” tells how Bobby Kennedy raided JFK’s medicine cabinet, found pills, and had them analyzed by the Food and Drug Administration. At the time, Jacobson, flown from New York by pilot, patient, and Presidential photographer Mark Shaw, injected Kennedy up to thrice weekly. Irate, Bobby kicked him from the White House.

“Speed” was then felt benign. “Its effect was [really] an exaggerated sense of power and capabilities,” said Reeves, “and the debilitating symptoms of classic paranoid schizophrenia.” Client Truman Capote didn’t care. “You feel like Superman ... You go 72 hours straight without so much as a coffee break ... Then you crash.” Singer Eddie Fisher was another pilgrim: “Jacobson is my God.” The Voice would have nodded. “Man, what he can do,” he said in 1963. “Those pills, they work.”

By 1968, “Dr. Jacobson could not account for quantities of amphetamines to the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs,” wrote Reeves. In 1975, the New York State Board of Regents revoked his medical license. Dr. Feelgood died four years later, having destroyed many medical records. No evidence proves that Jacobson gave amphetamines to his famous broadcast patient. It does show that a charlatan became Allen’s more Hannibal Lecter than Marcus Welby, providing and prescribing, at the very time Mel’s life went belly-up.

In 1974, Mel's dad, Julius Israel, 85, died in Stamford. “Cancer, liver, kidneys, he just fell away,” said Larry. Save siblings, the eldest son was alone. He revisited a fork. “I was near marriage several times,” The Voice said, softly. “My mistake was trying to please Mom and Dad. Every time I thought I’d found the right one I’d bring her to the house. The older you get the more you realize that you should have done what you wanted, then told the others.”

Grab a Ballantine Beer, Mel's famed Yanks sponsor. Light another, a White Owl cigar. Freeze-frame this stretch. Each day a card, passerby, or interview evokes fall, void, and stain. Their subject can’t escape a snide smile, curled lip, the knowing look. What happened? How could a lion turn leper? People still asked in 1995. “****, that’s thirty years ago, and I’m still working,” said Allen. “If I knew why, I’d be glad to tell ‘em, so I could get people off my back.”

Mel had nowhere to hide; nobody, help; no one, defend. Yet -- this is the thing -- he reacted gallantly, even nobly. TV’s John Walton says, “Bad things come to all of us. What counts, son, is how you handle ‘em.” Richard Nixon says, “You won’t have Nixon to kick around.” Teresa Heinz Kerry tells a columnist “to shove it.” Shunning victim-babble, Allen declined to slobber, blame, or rage.

“There is no radio/TV parallel to Mel Allen’s story,” said former Associated Presser Joe Reichler. “Overnight he goes from the planet’s most famous sportscaster to falling off a cliff.” In response, he grieved, endured, and sought a last outpost of strength.  In 1976, Mel joined "This Week In Baseball," voicing, becoming, sport's highest-rated TV serial.  To many, it seemed that he had never been away.  In 1996, Allen died, at 83, The Grand Old Man of Broadcasting, having lived a stirring, then despairing, and ultimately redeeming life.