A Well-Paid Slave Read online

  During his salary negotiations with Flood in March 1969, Devine knew that he could not find a comparable center fielder a month before the season. But he also recognized Flood’s retirement talk as a common negotiating ploy. In his gentlemanly way, Devine explained to Flood that he was only 31 and had plenty of time to reach six figures. Devine made a final offer of $90,000. Flood accepted, but his retirement threat had been real. “I’m making $90,000 now,” he told a reporter in March 1969. “If I have a good year I can hit $100,000. Three more years at that price and I’ll be set financially for life. I won’t have to work for money. I’ll be able to do what I want, go where I want, say what I want. I want to get as far away from baseball as I can. I am just tired of the struggle, the pressures, the problems of making it, the problems of staying on top, the fighting with umpires, the struggling for the base hits, the fears, the insecurities.”

  To escape the pressures of the playing field, Flood often resorted to drinking and womanizing. He enjoyed the party scene, both in St. Louis and on the road. He always seemed to have a vodka martini in his hand and a beautiful woman on his arm. The popular drug of choice among Flood and his fellow ballplayers, alcohol had aged Flood beyond his years and had begun to erode his playing skills.

  The first sign of Flood’s physical decline came at the worst possible time—the seventh and deciding game of the 1968 World Series. With no score in the seventh inning, two men on base, and his good buddy Gibson on the mound, Flood misjudged a line drive hit by Detroit’s Jim Northrup. The ball sailed over Flood’s head for a triple, scoring two runs and costing the Cardinals the game and the Series. Bitterly sipping champagne in the clubhouse after the game, Flood accepted full responsibility for his team’s defeat.

  In light of his World Series gaffe and subsequent contract demands, Flood’s trade from the Cardinals was inevitable. During spring training in 1969, Cardinals and Anheuser-Busch president August “Gussie” Busch lectured Flood and his teammates about their ungrateful attitudes. Flood, who had been Busch’s favorite player, went from being Busch’s pet to a pariah. In May 1969, the team fined Flood $250 for missing a team luncheon (he had suffered a 10-inch spike wound during the previous game and, because of the medication, had overslept). His bat orders stopped arriving on time. He discovered that someone had begun to take his customary parking space beneath Busch Stadium.

  “Something is happening,” Flood confided to pitcher Jim “Mudcat” Grant, who lived with Flood after coming to the Cardinals in June 1969 from Montreal. “They’re either going to trade me or something.”

  “They’re not going to trade you,” Grant said.

  “Yes,” Flood said, “they are.”

  In May 1969, the newspapers reported a possible trade of Flood, McCarver, and Javier to the Reds for second baseman Tommy Helms and 21-year-old star catcher Johnny Bench. In September, Flood made anonymous comments in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat criticizing management for giving up on the season by inserting rookies in key spots in the batting order. Devine responded that griping veterans could expect sweeping changes next season. Flood told McCarver during the last week of the season that he would retire rather than report to another team. “If they trade me,” Flood said, “I’m packing it in.”

  During his October 8 phone conversation with Devine, Flood cited the same mental and physical exhaustion as when he had threatened to retire before the 1969 season. Then he said something that threw Devine for a loop.

  Flood said he wished Devine had “shot me down” last spring.

  “When you say, ‘shot me down,’ ” Devine asked, “what do you mean?”

  If Devine had come back with anything less than $90,000 during their contract negotiations in early March, Flood explained, he would have retired before the 1969 season.

  Devine spent much of the conversation trying to talk Flood out of an “emotional reaction.” The Cardinals general manager believed that Flood still had a few more good seasons left in him, that he obviously liked playing center field because he had been doing it so well and for so long, and that once Flood had a few days or weeks to reconsider, he would report to the Phillies. Devine wanted Phillies general manager John Quinn to call Flood as soon as possible. The sooner Quinn talked to Flood, Devine believed, the less likely Flood would follow through with his plan to retire. Devine told Flood that Quinn would be calling him immediately.

  “Well, there’s not much use,” Flood replied. He had nothing to say to Quinn. There was no way he was going to report to the Phillies. He then offhandedly mentioned that Quinn had better call him soon because he was scheduled to leave for a previously planned vacation to Denmark. Devine told Flood to expect Quinn’s call.

  Flood sat in a chair by the phone for the rest of the day. The phone rang constantly, but he refused to answer it. Quinn called from Philadelphia, but one of Flood’s roommates told Quinn that Flood was unavailable.

  Flood publicly announced his plan to retire and responded to numerous media inquiries by issuing a press release. He said in the statement that the trade “comes as a surprise and a personal disappointment. . . . When you spend 12 years with one club, you develop strong ties with your teammates and the fans who have supported your efforts over a period of years. . . . Everyone in St. Louis—from Cardinals management to the various sportscasters and writers to the fans themselves—has made my baseball career a wonderful experience.”

  The remainder of Flood’s statement explained his decision and echoed his conversation with Devine:

  “For the past year or two it has been increasingly difficult to stay in top physical shape; as you know I’ll soon be 32 years of age. In addition, with my playing days nearing an end due to physical considerations alone, I’ve had to think of my own and my children’s future. Consequently, I’ve felt that I should give more time to the Curt Flood Photo Studio franchise business, as well as a large backlog of oil portrait commissions.

  “I then told Mr. Devine that the trade to Philadelphia has caused me to make a personal decision that I have been putting off for some time. If I were younger I certainly would enjoy playing for Philadelphia. But under the circumstances, I have decided to retire from organized baseball, effective today, and remain in St. Louis where I can devote full time to my business interests.”

  Devine, Quinn, the media, and even his fellow players did not believe that Flood was going through with his retirement. He had several major league seasons and big paydays in front of him. His interest in his photography and portrait business could wait. He’ll play, former Cardinals general manager Frank Lane said, “unless he’s better than Rembrandt.”

  Flood was a decent sketch artist, but his portrait painting career was illusory. In March 1967, he had presented Gussie Busch with a portrait of the beer baron in his sailing outfit. Busch was so enamored of the painting that he hung it in his 84-foot yacht, Miss Budweiser, and commissioned Flood to paint Busch’s children. Soon, Flood began accepting commissions to paint teammates, opposing players, and their families. He presented the governors of Illinois and Missouri with portraits, and the archbishop of St. Louis with a portrait of Pope Paul VI. He produced a portrait of a girl who had died of leukemia and donated his commission to the Leukemia Guild of Missouri. He usually gave portraits to teammates and friends as presents, then charged them if they wanted additional paintings of their children. During a two-year period, he had made an extra $15,000 on commissions. His teammates began referring to him as “Rembrandt.”

  Flood received the most publicity for a portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. After King’s assassination in April 1968, Flood unveiled a pensive image of the slain civil rights leader. He discussed the painting on the Today show and donated the original to King’s widow, Coretta, who liked the portrait so much that she hung it above her desk. “Your painting,” Mrs. King wrote Flood in 1968, “comes closest to depicting the dignity and reverence—and especially the love—which characterized his life.” In January 2002, she donated Flood’s portrait of her hu
sband to President George W. Bush. The portrait, which hangs in the East Wing of the White House, is signed by someone other than Flood.

  Flood did not paint the King portrait, nor, most likely, any of the others. Yes, he had been drawing since he was a child in West Oakland, and as a teenager he had earned extra money lettering signs for a local furniture store. During the fall of 1959, he had spent the first of two offseasons at Oakland’s College of Arts and Crafts. His sketches of teammate Dick Groat and manager Johnny Keane had appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Sporting News. But, as adept as he was with a pencil and a sketch pad, he could not paint oil portraits. Instead, he sent photographs of his subjects to a Burbank-based portrait artist who enlarged the photographs and painted over them. Flood simply signed his name to the finished products. Flood’s business partner, Bill Jones, watched him unpack the paintings from crates. The commissions kept rolling in. Flood had started something that he could no longer control.

  Flood’s reaction to the trade after the 1969 season took him on a similar course. It eclipsed his baseball career and the publicity from his portraits and soon took over his life.

  The day after the trade, Flood shut out baseball people and the media and brooded about what had transpired over the last 24 hours. That day an index card arrived in the mail.

  “Notice to player number 614,” the preprinted form said. The part of the form about being “optioned” or “released” had been crossed out. The remaining part indicated that Flood’s contract had been assigned to the Philadelphia club of the National League. It was signed by Vaughan P. Devine. Accompanying the index card was a one-sentence letter from Devine ending with “Best of luck.” “If I had been a foot-shuffling porter,” Flood later wrote, “they might have at least given me a pocket watch.”

  Flood was so depressed during the first two days after the trade that he considered canceling his trip to Denmark. His friend and business manager, Marian Jorgensen, talked him out of it.

  Few people understood Flood’s relationship with Marian, a white woman nearly 30 years his senior. They often asked if “that white lady” still lived with him. Their questions implied some weird sexual relationship where none existed. Marian was more of a mother hen than a muse. Mean and sometimes Machiavellian, she kept Flood’s business affairs in order and outsiders away. She had grown up in a prominent Bay Area family and lived off her inheritance. Flood met Marian and her husband, Johnny, through his junior high school art teacher, Jim Chambers, at the end of the 1962 season. The Jorgensens were progressive and freethinking in an era when most white people their ages could not comprehend the social and political upheaval of the 1960s. The Bay Area couple did not think in terms of skin color. Flood described them as “humanists.”

  The Jorgensens became Flood’s intellectual mentors, his confidants, and his family. They opened their Oakland home to Flood, his parents, his siblings, and his teammates. They helped him as he continued his quest for education and self-improvement. Their library was his library. They even created a downstairs apartment for him.

  The owner of an Oakland engraving and die company, Johnny taught Curt the trade. By virtue of his artistic talent, Curt was a quick study. He engraved the Lord’s Prayer on a die so small that it could be stamped on the head of a pin. The meticulous work soothed his nerves. Johnny made Curt a partner and viewed him as his eventual successor at the shop. Curt’s desire to work as a commercial artist after his playing days seemed to be coming true.

  On December 15, 1966, however, Johnny was stabbed to death at the engraving shop. Oakland police detectives, skeptical about a friendship between a younger black man and an older white woman, brought both Curt and Marian in for extensive questioning even though Curt had been in Los Angeles at the time of the murder. Ultimately, the detectives believed that a mentally disturbed teenager had committed the crime, but he was never charged.

  In 1967, Curt begged Marian to move to St. Louis. After two go-rounds, his marriage to Beverly, a model whose family owned a St. Louis nightclub, was over. Their five children lived with their mother outside of Los Angeles. His photography business needed supervision. His social life was out of control. He needed Marian to help him pull his life together. She responded to his cry for help.

  Carl Flood also came to St. Louis to live with his brother. Marian had taken a particular interest in Carl. One year older than Curt, Carl had been serving 20 years in federal prison at Leavenworth and McNeil Island for robbing a West Oakland Bank of America. An artist and poet, Carl had won prison chess championships and taught himself several languages. Marian had successfully campaigned for Carl’s early parole after he had saved the life of a prison guard who had been beaten up by other prisoners.

  Trouble soon found Carl in St. Louis. Although he was supposed to be earning $100 a week selling Curt’s portrait commissions, Carl had begun pocketing the prepaid commissions without providing any portraits in return. The money fed Carl’s $300-a-day heroin habit, which Marian was trying to help him kick.

  One mid-March morning in 1969, Carl and a convicted murderer held up a downtown St. Louis jewelry store. They took the store owners hostage when the police arrived, and tried to escape in a police cruiser. The police shot out the cruiser’s tires. Carl was charged with two counts of armed robbery and attempted theft of the cruiser. He was sentenced to 20 years in a Missouri state prison. Carl’s arrest only added to Curt’s frustrations during the 1969 season.

  Marian spent most of the 1969 season keeping tabs on Curt’s photography and portrait business and his personal affairs. As his business manager, secretary, and social conscience, she could drink, swear, and trade barbs with Curt like one of his Cardinals teammates. Some people thought that Marian manipulated Curt, that she restricted access to him, and that she was the driving force behind his eventual response to the trade.

  Two days after the trade, on the morning of October 10, Marian drove Curt to the St. Louis airport for the first leg of his flight to Copenhagen. As they sat in the airport bar, Curt bemoaned the unfairness of the reserve clause. Even before his trade, he had criticized the reserve clause in the press. Marian suggested that Curt challenge the system by suing Major League Baseball.

  Curt pondered Marian’s idea during his three-week trip to Copenhagen. Johnny’s parents had come from Denmark, and he and Marian had raved about Copenhagen. After the Cardinals’ postseason tour of Japan in 1968, Flood and some of his friends from St. Louis had toured Paris, Stockholm, and Copenhagen. “I went to Europe to relax, to get away from the pressures, to see museums and art galleries, to escape the things that are wrong here,” he told a reporter in March 1969. Flood fell in love with Denmark and planned on settling there after his playing career. He invested in a Copenhagen cocktail lounge called Club 6. He intended to reopen it after the 1969 season under the name Club 21, his uniform number with the Cardinals.

  Copenhagen was Flood’s sanctuary. He could walk the streets unrecognized and unself-conscious about being black. Artistic, impeccably dressed, and handsome, he rarely lacked female companionship. In October 1969, he met a tall black Danish woman named Claire. They talked about her running the cocktail lounge in Copenhagen. Although she was married, Claire agreed to return to St. Louis with Flood to check out the American restaurant and bar scene.

  Even in Copenhagen, however, Flood could not escape Major League Baseball. John Quinn called on his first night overseas. Flood reiterated his retirement plans to Quinn but promised not to make a final decision until he met with Quinn in person.

  On November 7, after returning with Claire to St. Louis, Curt met with Quinn for 45 minutes to an hour at St. Louis’s Chase Hotel. Quinn, who had stopped in St. Louis after a baseball meeting in Arizona, spent most of his time with Flood selling his team and his city. It was a tough sell.

  The Phillies were one of baseball’s worst organizations. They had lost in their only World Series appearances, in 1915 and 1950. In 1964, they had blown the National League pennant in a l
ate-season collapse for the ages. They treated their players like second-class citizens, sending them across the country on late-night commercial propeller flights in an era when most teams chartered jet planes.

  Flood described Philadelphia as America’s “northernmost southern city.” In 1947, Phillies general manager Herb Pennock reportedly urged Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey not to bring “the nigger here with the rest of your team.” Phillies owner Bob Carpenter threatened to pull his team from the field if Jackie Robinson played at Philadelphia’s Shibe Park. Rickey responded by inviting the Phillies to forfeit those games to the Dodgers. The Phillies played against Robinson and gave him a brutal reception. Philadelphia manager Ben Chapman, a Tennessee native who lived in Alabama during the offseason, led his players in yelling racial epithets across the field at Robinson, knowing that the black pioneer was not allowed to say anything back. The Ben Franklin Hotel in Philadelphia refused to allow Robinson to stay there, so the Dodgers moved to the Warwick. Ten years later, the Phillies became the last National League team to integrate. More recent charges of racism dogged the franchise, fans, and local media who vilified black slugger Dick (Richie) Allen. Allen tried to force a trade with unexcused absences and other rebellious behavior, leading the Phillies to send him to the Cardinals for Flood and McCarver. Allen’s ordeal was fresh in Flood’s mind.

  Quinn explained to Flood that the Phillies were turning things around and building a new ballpark. He told Flood about the city’s art museums and numerous galleries. He said that playing four or five more seasons would increase Flood’s name recognition as an artist. He related his own family’s experiences moving from Milwaukee, where he had been the Braves’ general manager, to Philadelphia.