Back in the 1950s, as I followed the hapless Washington Senators baseball team, I remember those dreaded road games in Boston, where one-run leads definitely were not safe in the bottom of the ninth. I remember the controversy over Red Sox player Jimmy Piersall and his mental illness, but I don’t recall that he was particularly dreaded at the plate (Ted Williams was). I do remember the death of Harry Agganis, even the newspaper headlines in 1955, when it was shocking that a 25 year old athlete could die of pneumonia.
“Fear Strikes Out” (1957), based on Jimmy Piersall’s own autobiography, directed by Robert Mulligan, tells the somewhat familiar story of the baseball player’s “nervous breakdown” shortly after making it to the Red Sox, as well as his treatment. The film only mentions at the end the long career that he had afterward. The Paramount film is presented in black-and-white VistaVision (I remember that a few years later, “Hud” would be technically controversial because of its use of black and white Cinemascope).
Anthony Perkins plays the young adult Piersall, in a “troubled young man” role that would anticipate his performance as Norman Bates in “Psycho” in 1960. The film takes the position that pressure from his father (Karl Malden) had a lot to do with his breakdown. At one point the film has some dialogue about what men owe their fathers, and then later, when Piersall gets married and contemplates getting a house, he says he will have to support his parents in the house.
There are plenteous warning signs, but after a fracas at a ball game involving the cops, Piersall finds himself in a straightjacket in a mental hospital. The last part of the film goes like an exposition of 50s style psychiatry. There is an episode of shock treatment, but then there is a lot of private individual therapy talk, which seems to go in aimless circles until Piersall has a confrontation with his father.
In my own therapy experience at NIH in 1962 (an “inpatient” setting) there was the same sort of runaround in the individual sessions, as I avoided dealing with certain fantasy material that does feed artistic expression today – a double-edged undertaking that others could take as disguised hostility. But the relationship with my father was a big issue, as it is in this film. (There was no psychiatrist's couch; but therapists smoked during sessions; they supposedly went through analysis themselves to find out why they wanted to become shrinks.) There is a scene where Piersall calls his father as to whether it is OK to play shortstop instead of outfield, and I recall a similar call to my own father in a new-job situation in 1963. Piersall would later claim that the Red Sox were plotting against him with the position change. The books say he had bipolar disorder, but it sounds more like paranoid schizophrenia.
Back in the 50s and early 60s, the accepted mantra was that mental illness is "nothing to be ashamed of." Pyschiatrists used "is not able to" as a euphemism.
The TCM broadcast contained a 10 minute short on the making of MGM’s “International Velvet” in 1978, by Bryan Forbes (with Anthony Hopkins).
Wikipedia attribution link for Fenway Park picture.
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