Best-selling author Tony Castro's latest book is Mantle: The Best There Ever Was (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019). The softcover edition of his acclaimed 2016 dual biography DiMag & Mick: Sibling Rivals, Yankee Blood Brothers (Lyons Press) was recently released, and his acclaimed biography of Ernest Hemingway will be out in September. NPR named Looking for Hemingway one of the best books of 2016. He was interviewed by Kerri Ladshaw.
Where are you from?
I grew up in Waco, Texas, in the heart of the Bible Belt in mid 20th century America, bilingual, bi-cultural, and religiously bi-polar.
Religiously bi-polar?! What in the world does that mean?
I was both Southern Baptist and Roman Catholic. But I quoted too much Protestant scripture for a good Catholic, and I knew too many saints and too much Latin for an acceptable Baptist.
And you’re Latino? Or do you go with the term Latinx?
I have no idea what that means. I grew up Hispanic at a time in segregated Texas when there were still three restroom facilities in public places — one for whites, one for blacks, and one for Mexicans. Perhaps it was an omen of my future that I could use the public toilets reserved for whites. I could pass. My English was impeccable. I was on the honor roll. My best friend was the son of the president of Baylor University, the college town’s pride and joy, and I could recite the prelude to The Odyssey — in ancient Greek. I was Mexican and Spaniard but with the luck of the Irish from a distant ancestor.
Kind of like the Third World?
I was the Third World, before we ever knew there was a Third World, living the American Dream deep in what we lovingly called “the heart of Texas” — which my late writer friend Larry L. King was quick to say is proof that there’s nothing wrong with Texas that a coronary transplant couldn’t help correct.
Tell me about growing up in Waco. What was that like?
That would take a lifetime to tell. In the second grade I performed so poorly that my teacher and school principal thought I might be mentally impaired and were preparing to place me in a special education classroom for children with severe learning disabilities. Fortunately for me, a student teacher working in my classroom suspected that I simply couldn’t speak or understand English. She was right. I was Hispanic, spoke only Spanish at home, and knew little English beyond some baseball terms and bits of lyrics from the Hank Williams tunes my parents sometimes played on their record player. I owe my life to this student teacher.
That’s so incredibly hard to believe.
I know. Try living it. About twenty years later I was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard closing down the Faculty Club with fellow Nieman alumnus Larry King. We were knee walking drunk almost through the snow in Harvard Yard in the direction of the Chauncy Street townhouse where I was living beyond the square and arguing over just which town in our distinguished native state of Texas had once been the home of an ignominious sign taking pride in its racism of the past — a sign declaring the town to be the “Home of the Blackest Land and the Whitest People.”
There was really such a sign?
Yes! Larry swore the sign with its cautionary warning had been posted on the side of the old Dallas highway on the outskirts of Waco. The words certainly described the town, but that sign never existed in Waco. I was no cheerleading chamber of commerce defender of Waco, though admittedly it did have a shameful history as the home base in the 1920s of the Texas Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Even so, I was certain that such a sign hadn’t even been a highway billboard but a banner that had hung over the main drag of Greenville, in Hunt County about an hour’s drive northeast of Dallas. “Welcome to Greenville: Home of the Blackest Land and the Whitest People.” I was right. Turns out that in one of the high points of my hometown’s history, the Klan had left Waco for Greenville during the Depression, perhaps believing its people were even whiter there.
So were you also born in Waco?
Yes. I am third generation American on one side of my family and fifth generation on the other. After World War II, my paternal grandfather who had fought with Pancho Villa in the Mexican Revolution relocated his entire extended family to Waco, and there bought a huge, dilapidated Victorian house that had been a notorious brothel at the turn of the century. I was born there, in a former madam’s bedroom.
Seriously?
Absolutely. In my youth, my parents nearly had heart attacks when they heard that I was going around town bragging that I had been born in a scandalous bordello. They were especially upset because by this time our home was a nice house just a block off the university campus. Our neighbors were professors. Imagine, though, the shock at high school interscholastic league competitions when the first six words out of my mouth were “I was born in a whorehouse.” Six words, and I was halfway home to a speech tournament medal. That’s how desperately I wanted to be a writer.
What brought you to Los Angeles?
I came out here to write a newspaper column for a great editor called Jim Bellows at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. It was the Avis to Hertz with the Los Angeles Times, and Bellows let another columnist, my pal Denis Hamill, and me raise hell in writing about Los Angeles, California, and the world for that matter. It was a dying newspaper, and Bellows made sure we spent all the money that was left. We lived at the old Ambassador Hotel for months and then at the Chateau Marmont on the Sunset Strip.
The Chateau Marmont, the celebrity hotel?
It was a great place for some unusual people watching. I’m surprised no one has written a book about the hotel from that aspect.
Who was the most memorable person you met there?
Just one! I can’t. Oh, well, Audrey Hepburn. I’d always wanted to meet her, and writing a column was an excuse for meeting anyone I wanted to. But perhaps the most memorable of all was Teo Davis, the screenwriter, who turned me on to his agent, Mike Hamilburg. His father produced Safe at Home! the Mickey Mantle-Roger Maris film from 1962 and a friend of Mickey's from that time on.
Teo also helped you with your Hemingway book, didn't he?
Teo was the son of Bill and Annie Davis, the American expatriates in Spain who hosted Hemingway during his last two visits there in 1959 and 1960. How many people can say that as children they were bounced on the lap of Ernest Hemingway and were told bedtime stories by him?
And Teo was living at the Chateau Marmont?
Kind of. Teo hung out at the Chateau Marmont and often crashed there. He spoke Spanish beautifully, and he had that kind of elegant charm of old world wealth and treated everyone with such magnanimity that the maids and servants at the Chateau Marmont would have done anything for him, including opening the door to whatever room was free. Teo had a place where he lived with his books — rare books he sold when he needed money — but that was way out in Pasadena, while the Chateau Marmont was where you could most often find him.
I was sorry to hear about his death.
He died too young, but he had lived hard. It was the strangest thing. Mike Hamilburg, our agent, died on New Year's Day 2016 and two months later, down to the day, Teo died. Within a span of two months, I lost my two closest friends. I think the last thing Teo read were the page proofs to my Hemingway book that he was so much a part of. He loved the book, and we had just celebrated the book with drinks at the Chateau Marmont. The next day he was gone. Later we had a wake for him there at the hotel.
You also met Pete Rose there, didn't you?
Actually, I met him coaching Little League. His youngest son Tyler and my oldest son Trey were teammates on a team that won a Little League championship and then they played together into high school. Pete was banished from Major League Baseball, but there was nothing that kept him from coaching youth baseball, and a lot of kids from those teams went on to play college baseball and a few were drafted.
What was Pete like?
That would take a book. Pete told great baseball stories, stories from first-hand and stories he'd heard, and he opened a lot of doors for me when I decided to write about Mantle, DiMaggio, Ruth and Gehrig. Pete is suspended from MLB but not from baseball people.
What was Pete's contribution on your Mantle book?
It's not just the stories or Pete's knowledge of baseball that have helped, it's also been his perspective — looking at baseball through the eyes of one of the all-time greats. That's different than the perspective of a fan or a baseball writer. He helped put a different spin on Mantle than I would otherwise have had.
You had already written a very well-received biography of Mantle. Why did you write Mantle: The Best That Ever Was?
I wrote it, I suppose you could say, because Merlyn Mantle, Mickey's widow, wanted me to write it. "You need to be Mickey's voice from the grave," Merlyn said to me in her last interview before her death in 2009. "You need to say it and champion it: that Mickey Mantle was the greatest baseball player of all time."
How did that last interview come about?
She contacted my agent Mike Hamilburg. She had a history with the Hamilburg family. Mike's father Mitchell had been the producer of the 1962 comedy Safe at Home! that Mickey had done with Roger Maris after their historic 1961 chase of Babe Ruth's single season home run record.
And you had known Merlyn from the 1970s?
Yes, I'd met Mickey in the early 1970s. I was just out of college working at a newspaper in Dallas and Mickey was in his second year after retiring. We met and bonded over golf. I knew him through the mid-1970s and then hooked up with him in the 1980s when Mickey was the star of the booming baseball card-memorabilia craze.
And you became his biographer?
When Mickey was dying in 1995, I wanted to read a book about Mickey to my two young sons and realized the books written about him were either outdated or not very good. By coincidence, Mike Hamilburg was my agent and put a deal in place for me to write Mickey Mantle: America's Prodigal Son which was published in 2002.
And then Merlyn contacted you after the book came out?
I think it was 2006. We hadn't spoken since the book came out, and I thought that maybe she hadn't liked it. But that wasn't it at all.
Why did she call?
It was about a number of things. I think Merlyn was already beginning to suffer the effects of Alzheimer's. When she reached out to me, we talked about a great number of things, among them some legal problems facing her granddaughter. We also reminisced about some of the conversations she and I had back in the early 1970s. I reminded her that I had kept my word in not using that material in Mickey Mantle: America's Prodigal Son. She appreciated that I had honored my promise to not use that material until after she and Mickey had passed away. And I assured her I would wait until the appropriate time after her death to write this book.
And Mantle: The Best There Ever Was is your third in a Mickey Mantle series. Did you set out to write a Mickey Mantle Trilogy?
Not really. It just happened. I wanted to write a biography of Joe DiMaggio as well as of Mickey Mantle, and so a dual biography of Mantle and DiMaggio was inevitable. DiMag & Mick: Sibling Rivals, Yankee Blood Brothers was published as a hard cover in 2016, and it's now also been released as a soft cover/paperback. It's cool that as we commemorated the 25th anniversary of Mickey's passing in 2020, that I could promote two Mantle books, Mantle: The Best There Ever Was as a hard cover and DiMag & Mick as a soft cover/paperback, at the same time. Mickey Mantle: America's Prodigal Son is still available as a mass market paperback and, of course, on Kindle.
