Robinson's Widow Labors To Erase Myths

She is 72 years old, Rachel Robinson is, just a few years younger than her late husband would now be. In her office, she wears a silk blouse and fine silver earrings. She is regal, beautiful, measured. Her preference is to focus on today, tomorrow, the day after that. The world won't let her do that. She is Mrs. Jackie Robinson. She is the widow of the seminal athlete of 20th-century America.

Her husband died in 1972, at age 53, of diabetes and heart disease. Jackie Robinson is the subject of books, a movie, statues, a stamp, university lectures, a play, songs. He's in the American Heritage dictionary: "American athlete; broke baseball's color line." He was in your father's living room, right there, on the TV, a dark man in a white flannel uniform. When he put on the uniform of the Brooklyn Dodgers for the first time in 1947, he desegregated a nation with a racist history.

And now Rachel Robinson is taking steps to ensure that her husband's legacy will never be forgotten. In 1997, on the 50th anniversary of her husband's breakthrough, Spike Lee, the filmmaker, is planning to release a movie about Robinson's life. Ken Burns, who created the public television series "Baseball," which featured a moving segment on Robinson, might direct a competing Robinson movie.

A major Robinson biography is expected to be published. Rachel Robinson plans to publish a collection of photographs of her husband. Her daughter, Sharon, expects to publish a memoir about her father. Maybe these works will reduce the burden of being Mrs. Jackie Robinson. More likely, they will add to it.

"So much to do"

For a score and two years now, Rachel Robinson has been the proxy for everything Jackie Robinson once represented. To an incalculable number of people - many millions, to be sure - Rachel Robinson represents Ebbets Field when it was a neighborhood baseball temple, New York when Benny Goodman's music streamed from radios, the United States when it was emerging heroically from the Second World War. She represents an era of limitless hope, when anything seemed possible in relations between blacks and whites.

Today, she is the chairwoman of the Jackie Robinson Foundation, a philanthropy that awards college scholarships. Right now, there are 128 Robinson scholars, each receiving up to $5,000 a year for four years. One former Robinson scholar is Elaine Weddington Steward, the assistant general manager of the Boston Red Sox and an African American.

Rachel Robinson takes particular delight in Steward's achievements because she knows, as well as anybody, that the Red Sox crawled their way to desegregation, that they vehemently objected to Branch Rickey calling up Jackie Robinson to the Dodgers in 1947, that they didn't have a black player until 1959, when they became the last team to integrate.

The foundation has modest offices at 35th and Fifth, in midtown Manhattan, several blocks away from the old hotel, the McAlpin, where Rachel and Jackie Robinson stayed when he was first called up.

"I walk by the McAlpin all the time, but I don't see it," Rachel Robinson said. "People I meet, people who recognize me, who write, they're the ones who pull me into the past. I live in the present and the future. There's so much to do."

Questions, questions, questions

She is two years behind in responding to her mail, and she does not attempt to settle baseball disputes.

Did Joe Garagiola spike her husband, drawing blood, in a certain inning of a certain game so many decades ago now?

"The fact is, I don't know," she said. "I don't fabricate stories. Enos Slaughter did. That's documented. Whether Garagiola did or not, I don't pretend to know."

Most of the queries to her are about social issues or about the personal characteristics of her husband.

"They want to know what kind of husband he was, what kind of friend, what kind of father," she said. "They want to know what he was like."

In recent weeks, the volume of calls and letters has increased. That's due, at least in part, to "Baseball," which aired in October. To many viewers, the most emotional moments of the 18 1/2-hour series were contained in a 10-minute section called "Safe at Home," about the life - and particularly the death - of Jackie Robinson.

"I think he died from the load he carried," Red Barber, the late radio announcer, says at one point.

Later, the Rev. Jesse Jackson is heard delivering Robinson's eulogy: "He was immunized by God from catching the diseases he fought."

Toward the end of the segment, Rachel Robinson describes how, in her days of mourning, she would carry with her from room to room a photograph of her husband stealing home. The photograph made her focus on the word "home." It brought her comfort.

Office like museum

Her office, these days, is a museum. Extraordinary photographs, most of them black and white, are on the walls, on the floor, leaning up against bookshelves, on windowsills. Jackie Robinson with Vin Scully, the television commentator, on ice skates, at Grossinger's, the old Catskills resort, years ago. Jackie Robinson with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Jackie Robinson with Richard Nixon. Jackie Robinson with his teammate Satchel Paige, each wearing the uniform of the Kansas City Monarchs when they were Negro Leaguers together.

Rachel Robinson is assembling the pictures for a book of photographs that will be published in 1997, on the half-century anniversary of Jackie Robinson's arrival in the majors.

No room for Chapman

Over the course of a two-hour interview in her office, the subject turned to an old, infamous photograph, one showing Jackie Robinson with Ben Chapman. Rachel Robinson doesn't have to think to recall Chapman. She knows.

When the Phillies, the last National League team to name a black player to their roster, went to Ebbets Field in April 1947, Chapman, who died last year, was the Phillies' manager. He instructed his players to join him in hurling vicious, taunting, racist remarks at Robinson.

Subsequently, the baseball commissioner, Albert B. "Happy" Chandler, attempting to limit the acrimony surrounding baseball's integration, prompted Robinson to pose for a picture with Chapman, shaking hands.

"There were times," Robinson wrote in his autobiography, "after I had bowed to deep humiliations, like shaking hands with Chapman, when depression and speculation as to whether it was all worthwhile would seize me."

Rachel Robinson was asked if the Robinson-Chapman photograph would make her book.

"Absolutely not," she responded firmly, her emotion still raw despite the passage of time. "Why take a scummy little man like that and give him a place in history?"

A different version

History, of course, has an unswerving tendency to revise itself. Chapman's son, Ben, said in a recent telephone interview from his home in Birmingham, Ala., that his father "had the utmost respect for Jackie Robinson, and Jackie Robinson had nothing but respect for my dad." The younger Chapman called the verbal baiting of Robinson "unfortunate" and said, with candor, that it reflected an uglier, meaner era. But he also believes that his father's motivation was to treat Robinson as he treated any other player.

"Those were different times," he said. "Baseball was rougher, not the genteel game it is today. If a Polish player came up, they said, `Hey, polack.' If you were a Jew, they called you a kike. All the Italian players were called wops. I believe Joe DiMaggio's nickname was `The Wop.' "

And when the lone black man on the field came to bat, he was called nigger, pitch after pitch after pitch.

Jackie Robinson had to stand in the batter's box and take the abuse, had to contain his fury. That was part of his deal with Rickey, who wanted to break baseball's color barrier with a player, he told Robinson early on, "with guts enough not to fight back."

In his autobiography, "I Never Had It Made," completed shortly before his death, Robinson always refers to Branch Rickey with the honorific "Mister." Rachel Robinson refers to Rickey the same way. But she also says there is a gross misunderstanding of the relationship between the two men.

"It wasn't that Mr. Rickey was Big Daddy, as it is often portrayed," Rachel Robinson said. "Very seldom, if ever, did Jack go running to Mr. Rickey because he had a problem."

`Experiment' was business deal

They were partners, she said, in something Rickey called "the Noble Experiment," and the experiment was a business deal as much as a test of civil rights.

"Jack was pleased that there was self-interest in it for Mr. Rickey," she said.

Rickey's eye for talent was extraordinary: Of the first eight black players he signed, two - Robinson and Roy Campanella - were elected to the Hall of Fame.

In the next several years, Rachel Robinson wants to see the story of her husband's life "told truthfully, without the myths and legends." She is searching now for a biographer to whom she will make herself and the family archives available.

In the meantime, Spike Lee is working closely with Rachel Robinson on his film. He is now, he said in a recent telephone interview, "reading everything I can read, interviewing all sorts of people, both his teammates and those he played against, to get the mood of that era, find out their attitudes towards Jackie. The racism doesn't ever just disappear."

An aggressive player

Lee was born in Brooklyn in 1957, the year after Robinson concluded his 10-year playing career with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Lee said the legend of Robinson, whom he met once at a college basketball game, hovered over his Brooklyn youth. He regards Robinson as one of the truly important figures of the century, as he regards Malcolm X, about whom he already has made a film.

Ken Burns is said to be interested in making a feature - his first - about Robinson, although if he does, it will be without the cooperation of Rachel Robinson. She thought Burns' baseball series for public television was extremely well done, but was chagrined to discover Burns' interest in making a movie about her husband from an item in Variety, sent to her by the son of Pee Wee Reese, one of her husband's Brooklyn teammates.

Burns, in a brief telephone interview, declined to talk about his interest in making a Robinson movie. He did say that "race relations is a theme in all the work I've done" and that he finds himself crying each time he watches the segment in his baseball series called "Safe at Home."

The major myth about her husband, Rachel Robinson says, is that he was filled with rage, that his anger was unrelenting. She pulled off her office floor a familiar photograph of her husband, showing him trapped between third base and home, his head going one way, his body going another, his face filled with defiance.

"You see that expression, that's a very aggressive expression," she said. "And he was an aggressive player, an "assertive" player. On a field, he was the most competitive person you could face. But the bigots look at a picture like this and they seize on it. They say, `The angry black man.' They assume that that's the man he was."

Family provides serenity

There is another picture on the wall of her office. It shows Rachel and Jackie Robinson, late in his life. It was taken by a family friend at a fund-raising jazz concert at the Robinsons' home in Stamford, Conn. It shows husband and wife, sprawled on a lawn, their heads pressed together, smiling joyfully. That is the Jackie Robinson that Rachel Robinson hopes the public will come to know in coming years.

There's a serenity about Rachel Robinson that belies the difficulty of her life, for virtually everything Jackie Robinson endured, she endured. She was chased out of towns, refused at hotels, denied use of bathrooms. She's known more than her share of tragedy. Her first son, Jackie Robinson Jr., was killed in 1971, at the age of 24, when he crashed his car. The next year, her husband died.

Her serenity, she says, comes from her family, from her foundation work. Her daughter, Sharon, who is writing the memoir, is a nurse, a faculty member at Yale. Her son, David, lives in rural Tanzania, with his family, in a hut without electricity or running water. He is a coffee farmer and an importer of African sculpture. Rachel Robinson spends six weeks a year with him and plans to travel there this month.

David Robinson, Rachel Robinson said, believes that an African American must first come to know his African side before he can know his American side. Jack Robinson, Rachel Robinson said, would be bursting with pride if he could see his children today.