Master Of The Joyful Illusion

At length, their sense of duty only half-fulfilled, the Yankees relented. They allowed the American League to allow the Browns to move to Baltimore if Veeck did not move with them. He and his backers agreed to sell out for $2.5 million.

It was a cankerous personal defeat for Veeck, but within two weeks he was back in baseball as a $l,000-a-month special assistant to Phil Wrigley, seeking ways of getting major-league baseball to the West Coast. Veeck spent 14 months and $75,000 of his own money on the project. At one point, in the hope that American League owners loved money more than they hated him, Veeck teamed up with Hotelman Conrad Hilton and Construction Man Henry Crown to try to buy the foundering Philadelphia Athletics and move them to Los Angeles. But the league blocked him and arranged for the club to be sold instead to the late Yankee landlord, Arnold Johnson, who moved the Athletics to Kansas City.

Subsequently Veeck failed in a bid to buy the Cleveland Indians again ("We were really setting a price so that Hank Greenberg could sell his stock"), saw his high bid for the Detroit Tigers ($5.5 million cash or $6 million "on time") turned down for a lower bid ("Sometimes you run into riverboat gamblers," he said bitterly) and failed to buy the Ringling Brothers Circus for $21.1 million.

A SWIFT MOVE

Not until Dorothy Comiskey Rigney tired of her bitter legal battle with her brother Charles over control of the White Sox did Veeck get his chance to acquire a club again. In the winter of 1958-59 he moved in swiftly and with half a dozen backers bought the 54% of the club controlled by Dorothy for $2.7 million.

The fiery illusions of fun he built around the game in Chicago—notably the exploding scoreboard, which fires off $60 worth of skyrockets and aerial bombs every time a White Sox player hits a home run—are now part of the durable Veeck legend. But some others of Veeck's changes were quite subtle. "Anything that happens in a ball park, from the moment a fan arrives to the moment he leaves, can ruin the impression of fun that you're trying to build," he says. "This requires an attention to detail." He offers, as an example, the metamorphosis of the dun-colored roach pit that was Comiskey Park. "If you remember, it was dark and dank when you came in; it was like going into a dungeon," he said. "So we painted everything under the grandstand white, tore down a few useless pillars and ripped out everything that hung overhead, that loomed over you. We wanted to get away from that dungeonlike atmosphere to one of cleanliness and airiness." This year, to promote the airy feeling, he painted the entire park white, inside and out, and he has promised to "turn night into day around here." Other details he labored over ranged from putting cloth towels in the washrooms instead of paper towels (cost: $500 a month just "to get a little extra class") to killing the smell of rancid butter around popcorn stands ("We tried 15 chemical sprays before we found one that worked") and establishing contact with the radar screen around Chicago in order to get early warning of approaching rainstorms so ushers could hand out plastic rain capes to fans in rain-exposed areas. "The important thing is to give them the capes before it starts raining, not after they've got wet," he says. "The intrinsic value of the capes [they cost 4�� apiece] is nothing. But the fact that you went out of your way to protect people, even that you're breeding some black art to know when it's going to rain, is important to the fans."

The impact of his methods was demonstrated in an important area: banishing the historic dislike women had for Comiskey Park. To overcome this attitude, Veeck worked on a variety of details. He stationed ushers just inside the gates to look for women who appeared confused and to escort them personally to their seats. He cleaned up and redecorated the once-nauseating powder rooms. He installed lighting in them that was subtly flattering ("A woman likes to think she's looking her best when she goes back into the world") full-length mirrors ("so she can check her seams"), and different levels of vanity tables. He gave away orchids and roses, let mothers in free on Mother's Day, gave away green stamps (instead of cigars or beer) on certain Sundays. The result was that the number of women attending games at Comiskey Park tripled (to about 420,000) and the proportionate number went up from less than 20% to more than 30%.

By far the most vivid part of the illusion which Veeck built up, however, was the bravura defiance of destiny by the 1959 White Sox. Employing an anachronistic philosophy of speed, pitching and defense, the White Sox won their first pennant in 40 years and drew 1,423,144 fans to Comiskey Park, double the attendance of 1958. The gross income at the gate alone—excluding the radio-TV rights and concession sales—soared to $3,587,400, an increase of 147% over the previous year. At the same time the Cub ticket sale decreased less than 7% (to a total of $1,367,000) in 1959. Thus Veeck's techniques, combined with the success of the White Sox, produced $2,039,800 worth of new business for baseball in Chicago.

Ever since moving to Chicago in March 1959, the Veecks have lived in a three-bedroom apartment on the ninth floor of a lake-front hotel on Chicago's South Side. They have four children, ranging from 21 months to 9 years old. At home, as in baseball, the impact of Veeck's personality is electric ("All of our children learned to say 'Daddy' first," says Mary Frances) but, in her own way, Mary Frances exercises the tyranny of the weak over the strong with great subtlety. She does all the personal buying for her husband, from toothbrushes to the 50 white sport shirts and the half dozen identical blue sports coats and slacks that Bill needs every year ("I haven't bought anything in 10 years," says Bill. "Not even a razor blade"). But she has never insisted that Bill wear a tie, not even at their nuptial Mass. She has achieved only one change: she succeeded in switching Bill from tan sports clothes to navy blue "because navy blue was simply more practical for handling by the wife in this family."

The only routine that Veeck follows is early in the morning. Usually he spends 60 to 90 minutes bathing the shrunken stump of his right leg. This is the time when he gets a chance to read and reflect, when the reality of Bill Veeck—the substance behind and beyond the legend—becomes apparent and the far reaches of his private universe are explored. "I'm for the dreamer," he said not long ago. "The only really important things in history have been started by the dreamers. They never know what can't be done."