Like his MVP season in 1954, Mays’s triumphant year in 1965 led to invitations outside baseball. He was invited to Washington to meet Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who asked him to visit Youth Job Corps Centers during the Christmas season. “Willie, the kids will listen to you,” Humphrey said. “All you have to do is talk to them.” Mays didn’t think he could solve the problems of the world, but he could talk to kids. In Washington, he addressed fifty young “Job Corpsmen,” including a boy who, during the question-and-answer period, vented his anger against the “theys” who wouldn’t let him be what he wanted to be—a minister. The boy grew more and more agitated until he started sputtering.
Mays held up his hand. “Cool it, baby,” he said. “I’m on your side.” The boy calmed down.
“If you want to be a minister,” he said, “you be a minister. Don’t let anybody stop you. When I was twenty, I had one hit for twenty-four times at bat with the Giants. If I had taken a lot of advice, I’d have quit baseball then. If you want to be a minister, you keep on trying.” The boy seemed convinced.
Throughout the mid 1960s, Mays appeared on television talk shows and variety hours, such as The Hollywood Palace, and continued to make cameos on sitcoms. He was introduced to Tony Owen, the television producer, who told Mays he was married to the actress Donna Reed. The name was unfamiliar at first, but then Mays recalled seeing her in Westerns and From Here to Eternity . He became friendly with the couple, and they told him that whenever he needed money, he could come on The Donna Reed Show, which featured a white middle-class family in a white midwestern town in white America. Mays did need the money, so he appeared in three different episodes, playing the only part he knew—himself. In one episode, he and Don Drysdale, also playing himself, competed to sign a hot prospect (Reed’s son on the show). The youth shunned the riches of baseball and chose to continue his education. He was twice a mystery guest on What’s My Line?, and in 1965 he was a contestant on The Dating Game . An actress, Judy Pace, questioned three bachelors hidden behind a screen and chose Willie Mays. The date was supposed to be in Ankara, Turkey, but after the show Mays said he didn’t want to go to Turkey, so instead they went, properly chaperoned, to Nassau, in the Bahamas. The trip resulted in a spread of handsome photographs in Ebony but not much romance. Mays spent most of the time on the golf course and visiting his former teammate Andre Rodgers. Asked if she was disappointed, Pace said, “Not really. I love shopping and playing on the beach, and he did take me out to dinner.” (One viewer of the show was Cardinal outfielder Curt Flood, who was so smitten with Pace that he spent almost a year trying to meet her and more than twenty years later married her.)
Mays was becoming part of the establishment, in baseball and in San Francisco. He was recruited to become the first black member of the Concordia-Argonaut men’s club, which comprised mainly wealthy Jews, and Mays, along with Joe DiMaggio, were voted into the city’s Press Club. To his surprise, Mays discovered that people would actually pay money to play golf with him. Mays also received a raise from the Giants. While news reports speculated that he was asking for $150,000, he signed a two-year contract for $125,000 a year. Koufax, after holding out, signed for the same amount in 1966.
Mays’s off-season took a jarring turn in December, when he made his first stop on his tour for the Job Corps. Traveling with Jake Shemano, Mays was giving a talk in Salt Lake City when he had another fainting spell. “He said he was a little woozy,” Ted Kirkmeyer, city manager for the Intermountain theaters, told a wire service reporter. “He was determined to speak, got up, and walked toward the stage. Then he said, ‘I just can’t make it,’ and went and sat down.” Mays couldn’t deliver his speech. Leaving the theater, a reporter noticed tears in his eyes.
Herman Franks lived in Salt Lake City, so a police car took Mays to his home, where he stayed for a week. At Franks’s insistence, he canceled the rest of his trip, which would have taken him to five cities in as many days. He was examined by a doctor, who, according to Mays, said he was suffering from exhaustion. In a telephone interview, Dick Young asked how he could be tired when he hadn’t played baseball in more than two months.
“I know, but I’ve been going pretty good. Banquets and this Jobs Corps thing almost every day. I get tired. I’m gonna have to take a little rest.”
“Willie, other people get tired, but they don’t pass out.”
“I know. That’s what I can’t figure out.”
Mays never did figure it out. Nor did any doctor. Perhaps the specter of five consecutive nights of speeches or acting at the behest of the vice president raised his anxiety level, or perhaps even in the off-season he was not getting enough rest. In the meantime, Shemano returned to San Francisco, and Mays recuperated with Franks, who himself was recovering from surgery. The two had long conversations, and Franks expressed his concern for Mays’s financial well-being. Mays still owed the IRS $16,240, and Franks didn’t care for his current adviser.
“I don’t think Shemano’s doing a damn thing for you,” he said. “For the next five years, you’ll make more than a million bucks, and you’ll end up broke.”
Franks offered to make his own “tax man” available to Mays. He also encouraged Mays to invest his money with him, but he made a demand: “You have to quit Jake Shemano.”
A war was on between two headstrong men, Franks and Shemano, over what was best for Mays. When Mays returned to San Francisco, he told Shemano about Franks’s recommendation that he change accountants. Shemano had already provided him with one, and he said that Franks’s accountant could not be trusted. Franks was also unhappy about Mays’s deferred income, as negotiated by Shemano; Franks thought the income should be paid and invested. Both men had similar motives: they considered Mays their friend and wanted to help him, but they also recognized his value as their business partner. Just as Mays was an ambassador for Shemano’s bank, Mays could help Franks recruit other ballplayers to invest their money with him.
In theory, both men could have worked with Mays, but the antagonism between them was personal. At one point, Franks went to Shemano’s bank and argued bitterly with him over Mays’s finances. Mays would have to choose between the man who saved him, financially, during one of the lowest points of his life, and the man who had shared a locker room with him off and on since 1951 and now promised him riches.
Mays chose Franks. Years later, he says the decision was practical. Franks was going to earn him money whereas Shemano could only take care of it. “Sometimes when you have a friend who’s going to make you money, sometimes you have to lean on him,” Mays says. But the baseball connection was also a factor. No matter how grateful Mays was to Shemano and his family, they could never have the same standing as his manager. Shemano felt betrayed, and the break was complete—Shemano stopped talking to Mays, who severed ties with Shemano’s bank and returned his silence with silence.
The economic consequences of this decision are in dispute. In an interview several months before he died, Franks said Mays received outstanding returns on his real estate investments, though he offered no specifics, and he took credit for digging Mays out of his financial hole. Mays says he received checks for many years from those investments but is vague about details. Others believe he is protecting his friend. Sy Berger, a retired baseball card executive at the Topps Company who has known Mays since 1951 and is one of his closest friends, says, “I constantly told Willie, ‘Herman did nothing for you. He lives off you. You don’t live off Herman.’ And he told me, ‘No, no, no. Herman is a good guy.’ ”
What is clear is that when Mays retired, he was still living paycheck to paycheck, and Franks’s overlapping roles—financial adviser, investment partner, and baseball manager—created conflicts of interest that would never be tolerated today.
The real tragedy, however, was not financial but personal. When Mayor Christopher left office in 1964, Jake Shemano lost his patron at City Hall. Business suffered, Golden Gate National Bank’s stock price cratered, and the enterprise failed. “My father ended up losing everything,” Jake’s son Gary says.
Years passed, and Jake Shemano would not reach out to the man to whom he had once devoted so much of his life. Maybe he was too hurt; maybe he was embarrassed by his own financial setbacks. But the breach between the two men was never closed. In the 1970s, Shemano was stricken with prostate cancer; the treatments failed, and in 1977 he was in the hospital, dying, when he told his family he wanted to see Willie, to talk, to make amends.
Mays, retired from baseball, lived in the Bay Area, and Gary called the person who screened all of his requests. “My dad’s got a couple of days left,” Gary said, “and he would love to see Willie.”
Mays never showed up. He sent a get-well card instead.
“It broke my heart,” Gary says, “because I saw my dad’s heart break. The only thing he asked for was that he wanted to see Willie.” Now in his sixties, Gary acknowledges that the correct message may not have been forwarded to Mays, but the pain lingers. “I’ll probably take it to my grave,” he says.
Mays, when asked about the incident, says he has no recollection of getting a message about Shemano’s illness, but even if he had, he would not have gone to the hospital because he never makes that kind of call. Visiting anonymous children was one thing, but he would not see acquaintances or intimates. “I was a guy who couldn’t handle that,” he says. “I couldn’t handle someone dying who I really enjoyed being around.... Maybe [Shemano’s family] didn’t understand me at the time.”
Mays talks about his need to be surrounded by “happy things,” which is why he rarely goes to funerals, and when he does, he will not look in an open casket and will often leave early. When he is watching television, he will click to a different channel to avoid a scene that is particularly violent or sad. On one level, his ability to shield himself from hardships and forget past misfortunes has served him well. He does not drown in yesterday’s sorrows. But on other matters he has a sharp memory—anyone who slights him will not return to his good graces. That may be understandable for a man who has often felt exploited, but nothing can justify his neglect of those who genuinely care for him.
His indifference toward Jake Shemano was one example, a reminder that Mays was never good at the intricacies of friendship. He takes pride in helping friends, and had Shemano asked for money, Mays would have sent it, in cash. But what Shemano needed—empathy, reconciliation, a piece of Willie’s heart—Willie couldn’t give.
Shemano’s son Richard maintained his friendship with Mays, which led to arguments with his brother. But Richard died in 2003, and Gary, who runs an investment firm in San Francisco, has made his own peace with the man he idolized as a boy. Mays called him one day when he needed help assessing the value of his memorabilia. Gary sent his son, who’s in the jewelry business. The ice was broken. A friendship was renewed. Gary now visits Mays at his home, he calls him on his birthday, and he worries about him. The two do not speak of his father.
The best thing that ever happened to Willie Mays was Mae Louise Allen, who could draw out his warmth and humanity as few others could. Ask a hundred people about Mae, and you’ll hear a hundred glowing comments. The word “saint” is sometimes invoked, and if any man ever found one, Willie did in her.
The actual romance, had it been a Hollywood script, would have been rejected as a mawkish fable. It began with a chance encounter between a beautiful maiden’s doting mother and a shy, handsome prince from the big city. Years later, the young girl miraculously meets her lonely idol; moving from coast to coast over the next two decades, they realize great success in their separate endeavors and forge a lasting bond but are unable to pledge their eternal love.
It pretty much happened that way.
Mae Allen’s family lived in the racially integrated Homewood section of Pittsburgh. Mae’s mother, Clara, was a tall, slender woman who loved fashion and cosmetics and sometimes modeled for Revlon. She was also a big sports fan, and when she traveled to New York in 1952 for Revlon, she visited the Red Rooster, hoping to secure an autograph from her hero, Jackie Robinson. The owner told her that the Dodgers were out of town, but she might like an autograph from a young Giant who was going to be the next superstar. She met Willie Mays, who gave her an autographed picture of himself, and was impressed by the nice, clean-cut young man.
“You’re going to marry my daughter someday,” she said (a comment Mays had heard before).
Mae was only thirteen, and she was disappointed with the photograph. She had been expecting Jackie Robinson. An only child, she resembled her mother in height, physique, and beauty, with soft shoulder-length hair, high cheekbones, and caramel-colored skin, and she modeled at Ebony fashion fairs in Pittsburgh. She was not brash like her mother but was closer in temperament to her father, Emmett, a proud, soft-spoken man who was an excellent tennis player and hardworking chauffeur. He was also a baseball fan, and when the Giants were in town, he would take Mae to Forbes Field to watch the player whose signed photograph she possessed, the great Willie Mays.
Mae was an active, popular teenager who ran sprints for a YWCA track team, marched in her high school drum and bugle corps, worked as a camp counselor, and loved the outdoors. She attended the University of Pittsburgh, part of a small group of black students at the school in the late 1950s, and found a home as a member of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority; she earned her degree in sociology.
After graduating in 1960, she was allowed to take a vacation with two girlfriends to Atlantic City, where she was introduced to a rookie basketball player named Wilt Chamberlain, who played for the Philadelphia Warriors. “Wilt was just coming off a tour,” Mae recalled. “He had the biggest Cadillac I ever saw and a big pocket full of money—like $10,000 in cash. We had a lot of fun and remained friends through the years.”
The following year, on a Sunday night, Chamberlain was at Small’s Paradise, a Harlem club he owned, when Willie Mays walked in. The previous Sunday he had hit four home runs in Milwaukee, so Ed Sullivan had invited him on his show. After his appearance on May 7, he had time to kill. When he saw Chamberlain, he said he was heading for Pittsburgh the following day.
“Man, do you know any girls there?” he asked.
“I know these girls I met last year,” Chamberlain said. “This one girl is kind of square, but she has friends.”
Mays took her phone number, and when he got to Pittsburgh, he called it.
Mae was home from graduate school at Howard University in Washington. She had just picked up a newspaper when the phone rang.
The caller asked for Mae Louise Allen.
“Speaking,” she said.
“You don’t know me, but I’m Willie Mays.”
She assumed some prankster knew of her fondness for Mays—she considered herself “a super fan”—and was now playing a joke. She had no time for jokes. “Yes,” she said, “and I’m Martha Washington.”
She hung up and, as usual, the first section she pulled out of the paper was the sports page. The headline read: MAYS & CO. IN TOWN TO PLAY BUCS. Mae gasped, wondering if that could have possibly been him. If it was, what had she just done?
Willie called again, explained how he had her phone number, and asked if she liked baseball.
She said she did but was a fan of the Pirates and Dodgers.
Willie invited her to the game, and she went with her father and two girlfriends. They met him afterward and thanked him, with Mae’s father scrutinizing him carefully. “He wasn’t sure about him,” Mae recalled.
Willie asked her out to dinner but said, being a ballplayer, he had a curfew.
“I have one too,” she assured him.
Before he left town, he took her to dinner, and he brought McCovey along.
They stayed in touch as Mae returned to graduate school. After she received her master’s degree in social work, she moved to San Francisco. Willie wasn’t the only reason. Pittsburgh, the country’s steel capital, offered few opportunities for a young, highly educated black woman, and Mae had always dreamed of moving to California. But Willie was the true draw.
“She thought Willie was her soul mate from the first time they met,” says her cousin Judi Phillips. “She never dated another person, and needless to say, she had tons of admirers.”
It was a difficult time. Willie was still going through his divorce and wasn’t prepared to get seriously involved. “I couldn’t figure out what he wanted with me,” Mae recalled. “Willie is only seven years older than me, but at that time it seemed like a lot. He was also very famous. But he was shy, and I liked him.”
Mae built her own life. She got an apartment and found a job as a child welfare worker in the adoption division of the San Francisco Department of Social Services. She became, according to the Chronicle, “a pioneer in getting single adoptions started in San Francisco.”
Over the years, Willie’s relationship with Mae ebbed and flowed, and he dated other women, but they were never apart for long. Though the women’s movement was gaining steam, Willie was still a Depression product of the Deep South who clung to traditional views. He would forbid Mae, for example, to wear short skirts or show cleavage. In 1974, Mays appeared on Merv Griffin’s show with the actress Marlo Thomas, and he was asked, “What do you think women’s role should be?”
Mays said, “Women belong in the kitchen.”
He was roundly booed, and Thomas, an outspoken feminist, was aghast.
“Hey, that’s the way I feel about it,” Mays said. “You asked me, so I told you.” It was the last time he made such a comment in public.
The irony was that Willie loved a woman who did not stay in the kitchen but seemed to satisfy the feminist ideal—a financially independent professional who was not tethered to a man for her own happiness. Mae was his opposite in so many ways, possessing the very traits that he lacked and, in some cases, coveted. Mae had an advanced degree. She was expressive and spoke with precise diction and grammar. She was organized and careful with her budget. She was comfortable in front of strangers and courteous to a fault. She liked the arts. She trusted others. She hugged friends.
Willie never had to work that hard at courtship, which was just as well, for he disdained the whole process. Even the most innocuous gesture, such as holding hands, did not come naturally; Mae had to teach him the grammar of affection. When they started dating, they went out with their friends Jessie and Buddy Goins, and when Buddy held Jessie’s hand, Mae exclaimed, “See, that’s what you’re supposed to do!”
Other times Mae put her arm around Willie, who said, “What are you doing, girl?”
“What do you mean?”
Willie shrugged. “Okay.”
Or Mae teased him. “Come on, I dare you to kiss me in front of everybody.”
“You’re crazy,” he responded.
Willie was so absorbed in baseball, so entrenched in a male world, that sometimes he simply forgot about Mae. On one occasion, he drove Mae to the ballpark, and after the game he headed to the parking lot, got into his car, and was getting ready to leave. He only stopped when he saw Mae running after him.
But Mae understood the pressures on Willie—those that he imposed on himself and those from the public—and she saw in him the quiet decency of a man who was trying to do the right thing. “He’s not a symbol,” she said. “Oh, he’s sexy and all, a real man. But he’s not like Joe Namath. He’s the guy in the white hat.” Says Gary Shemano, “She saw a side to his soul that was much more enduring than what we might see on the outside.”
Their most obvious bond was baseball. Willie and Mae played catch, and to her friends’ dismay, Willie threw the ball hard, but Mae held her ground and fired it right back. At Candlestick she bought seat cushions for $1.75 apiece and flung them in the air when Willie hit a home run. They were in lockstep literally: Willie walked fast through crowds—otherwise he’d be mobbed—and Mae, the high school sprinter, kept pace.
“Mae was his biggest fan, and she loved him uncontrollably,” Jessie Goins says.
The feeling was mutual, for Mae’s tenderness and devotion triggered a response in Willie that few had seen. “Mae was Willie’s catalyst,” says another friend, Phil Saddler. “He adored her. She’d walk into a room, and he’d light up.”
Throughout the 1960s, the gossip columnists tried to track who Mays was dating, but unlike other celebrity bachelors, he shunned the nightlife and was hard to pin down. When reporters asked when or if he was going to remarry, he expressed a desire to do just that but offered no specifics. He never mentioned Mae’s name or introduced her at any public event. The years passed, and no proposal was forthcoming. The decade ended, and Willie and Mae remained together but single.
Willie was scared. Whenever the topic of marriage came up, he would walk away, and Mae didn’t pressure him. “I don’t know if this will ever happen, marriage-wise,” she told her cousin. “But I’ll be patient.” She knew that the wounds from his first marriage hadn’t healed. “Oh my goodness,” she said. “I don’t know that he’ll ever trust again.”