Master Of The Joyful Illusion

In the secret reaches of his private universe, there is little that the dreamer in Bill Veeck says can't be done. His success, his failures, his joys, his sorrows have created an extravagant legend that even for him tends to obscure reality. To the public, Bill Veeck, president of the Chicago White Sox baseball club, is a brashly clamorous individual who has fashioned a brilliant career out of defying the customs, conventions and crustaceans of baseball. It is an authentic yet one-dimensional view. For Veeck is also an intelligent, impetuous, whimsical, stubborn, tough-fibered, tireless individual with a vast capacity for living and a deep appreciation for humanity. He is full of the humor that springs from the unsuppressed human being. To Veeck, baseball is not an ultra-constitutional mission, a crusade, a holy jousting for men's minds, souls and pocketbooks, but simply an exhilarating way to make a living. His approach to the game is seasoned with an almost visceral irreverence, a wit that is sometimes droll, sometimes raffish, sometimes wry or macabre, and sometimes abusive. A few months after emerging from the hospital where his right leg had been amputated, he threw a "coming-out" party. The high point of the party was achieved when Veeck ripped off his artificial leg and nourished it before the startled eyes of his guests. "It itches," he said.

He has the wit and the grace to make fun of what Veeck hath wrought. When he took over the St. Louis Browns in 1951, he warned the fans to "stay away unless you have a strong stomach." Naturally, many fans rushed out to the ball park to see what he was talking about. "They came out to see if the ball club was as bad as I said," he says, "and it was." Later on, while making a public appearance in New York, he apologized for his nervousness. "As operator of the St. Louis Browns," he explained, "I am not used to people." He outlined his strategy for making the Browns a pennant contender. "We've sold half of our ballplayers and hope to sell the rest," he said. "Our secret weapon is to get a couple of Brownies on every other team and louse up the league."

Behind this facade is a man with a highly perceptive vision of baseball's appeal. "This is an illusionary business," Veeck said not long ago. "The fan comes away from the ball park with nothing more to show for it than what's in his mind, an ephemeral feeling of having been entertained. You've got to heighten and preserve that illusion. You have to give him more vivid pictures to carry away in his head." The most exalted illusion of all is satisfaction about the game ("The only guarantee of prosperity in baseball is a winner"), but that illusion, says Veeck, must be augmented by a feeling that it was fun to be at the ball game. In support of this conviction, Veeck has given fans live lobsters, sway-back horses, 30,000 orchids, a pair of un-crated pigeons, and 200 pounds of ice. He has staged circuses and brought in tightrope walkers and flagpole sitters and jugglers and the Harlem Globetrotters to perform between games of a double-header. He has shot off several kilotons of fireworks (see cover) after night games ("If you win, it's a bonus for the fans on top of the flush of victory; if you lose, they go away talking about the fireworks, not the lousy ball game").

Some of his stunts have been aimed directly at getting customers into his ball parks. In Milwaukee during World War II he introduced "breakfast baseball" for night workers in war plants and had ushers in nightshirts serve coffee and rolls. In Cleveland he spent $20,000 building the Kiddie Koup—for small children whose mothers wanted to come to the ball park. At St. Louis he held a Grandstand Managers day in which the fans indicated their choice of strategy through boos or cheers when placards were held up that said "Infield back?" or "Bunt?" or "Pinch hitter?" The Browns won the game 5-3, and Veeck promptly dissolved the Grandstand Managers club. "Quit while you're ahead," he advised. "You've got a perfect record now."

At the age of 46, Veeck retains many of the elfin enthusiasms of his youth, though the years have thinned his once-bushy, pinkish-blond hair to a pair of tracks and a tuft of straw and his face has assumed the rutted dignity of a mask done in clay by a slightly arthritic sculptor. But there has been a quickening of the currents and contradictions that make up the man. He is an omnivorous reader who likes to talk out his thoughts. He is a gregarious companion with an introspective streak. He is an undisciplined spirit of spontaneous inspirations, yet he is hard-working—he rises at 4 or 5 o'clock virtually every morning and works 16 to 20 hours a day. He is intensely competitive. Even though he has only one leg, he continues to play tennis and paddle ball. "Does a man stop smiling because he wears false teeth?" he asks. He is painstakingly unpretentious. He works in a onetime reception room in Comiskey Park, answers all his mail himself (writing in longhand on the margins of the letters) and takes phone calls at all hours of the day and night.

Unlike most larger-than-life personalities, Veeck exhibits in public a self-deprecatory air and in private a remarkable sense of charity of heart and purse.

At times he is as insistent and impetuous in his charities as in his business dealings. When one friend refused to allow Veeck to buy him a much-needed automobile, Veeck phoned a children's home in which the friend was interested and announced he would buy anything it needed. "Take a little time to think it over," he said. "Take six hours."

Frequently his greatest labor is preparing a gag to be pulled on a friend. Once Veeck took the trouble to learn a Slovakian dialect so that he could deliver U.S. Senator Frank Lausche's "ethnic group" speech—the one where Lausche spills emotionally and apparently spontaneously into the mother tongue—to a foreign-born audience that Lausche was about to address. Lausche, of course, had to forego his own performance. "He was so mad," says Veeck with tonic glee, "that he wouldn't drive me home."

Veeck has studied—studied, not browsed in—accounting, architecture and "at law." (He discovered a few years ago that some states still offer admission to the bar to persons who study, as Abraham Lincoln did, under a lawyer's guidance and tutoring.) He reads four books a week, has written a novel ("50,000 words and now they want me to put in dialogue!") and played a role in an allegedly professional production of The Man Who Came to Dinner. "Putting me on the stage was like putting Sarah Bernhardt on second base," he said at the time. "The theater people would think she was out of place and the baseball people would know it." His conversation ranges restlessly over a seemingly limitless mental horizon, from baseball to philosophy and back again.

It was this restlessness that touched off, some 11 years ago, the intellectual revolution that led to his becoming a convert to Roman Catholicism. "I'd studied everything from Buddhism to Magna Mater," he says. "In fact, I gave quite a bit of thought to Judaism." He approached Catholicism with a healthy skepticism, challenging and even dropping instruction when it did not respond to his intellectual need. "He had the toughest mind I've ever encountered," says the Rev. George Halpin of Chicago, the priest who ultimately brought Veeck into the Church. "He was a great student of comparative religions. He never asked an ordinary question." When Veeck voiced doubts about a single footnote in a 600-page volume on Catholicism, Father Halpin spent three days and probed through 13 books with him in an effort to establish its intellectual validity. "It was a most interesting three months," says Father Halpin of the period of Veeck's instruction.