Forever Blue: The True Story of Walter O’Malley, Baseball’s Most Controversial Owner, and the Dodgers of Brooklyn and Los Angeles (review)

Every now and then in what essentially is an authorized biography of Walter O’Malley, Michael D’Antonio, a good writer and previously a biographer of chocolate baron Milton Hershey, lets slip a revealing insight into his protagonist’s essential nature. Upset that he was not offered a significant administrative job in World War II, Walter O’Malley wrote an Army official that he was not going to give up his law practice “just to be assigned to some stupid task . . . behind a desk passing on five and ten-cent requests” (63). Not long after he wrested control of the Dodgers from Branch Rickey in 1950, O’Malley met a rich woman who offered him $5 million for his team. “He was so stunned that he dropped his drink on her,” D’Antonio writes (137). During a tangle with a local politician in the Dodgers’ Florida training headquarters in Vero Beach, Florida, O’Malley warned, “I do not know how to run away from a fight” (165).

Forever Blue begins with promise in an opening chapter “The Two O’Malleys” that explains how Walter O’Malley (1903–1979) came to his hauteur and sense of entitlement as the only child of Edwin O’Malley, the New York City commissioner of markets and a kingpin of the local Tammany Hall political machine. D’Antonio provides a tantalizing detail, that in 1920 a rising young New York political eminence named Robert Moses was on the trail of Edwin O’Malley for irregularities in selling licenses for stalls in the city markets. The controversy was a front-page story at the time, and most observers expected the senior O’Malley to lose his job. Yet critics underestimated the wiles and gift for blarney of Edwin O’Malley, who filibustered for over two hours in a witness chair until his own lawyer ordered him off the stand. Edwin O’Malley didn’t lose his position, although he did get a slap on the wrist and was denied a customary banquet in his honor.

Meanwhile Edwin O’Malley had sent Walter to the Culver military school in northern Indiana—the same school that George Steinbrenner would later attend (a fact omitted by D’Antonio, who is not a baseball historian). He offered such paternal advice as “Chin up. Keep slugging. Never let anyone walk over you” (10). That would never be a problem for Walter, who found the environment of Culver so congenial that when his son Peter was born in 1937 he arranged for his son’s matriculation. Walter enjoyed the University of Pennsylvania even more, becoming the first student to be elected both junior and senior class president. The motto adopted by O’Malley’s Penn class of 1926 would fit his future life very well: “Hard as nails, full of tricks” (18).

Walter O’Malley’s romancing of his future wife Kay Hanson is a moving story told well by D’Antonio. She was diagnosed with cancer of the larynx during their courtship, and the ensuing operation turned her voice to a whisper. It was feared that she would not be able to have children. Walter remained steadfast in his love and went ahead with the marriage over the objection of his father, who did not attend the wedding. Happily, Kay was able to give birth to two children, one of whom—Peter’s older sister, Teresa—served as a model for a baby in an Ivory Soap magazine ad. D’Antonio peppers his narrative with other tidbits like this that add to its readability.

The Depression was not be kind to Edwin O’Malley, who lost most of his savings in the stock market crash. Meanwhile, Walter was rising in the world, earning a law degree at night and working as an assistant engineer and surveyor for...