A Doris Day Baseball Threesome, Part 3
Maury Wills, Banjo Player
Welcome to Part Three of our Doris-Day-Maury-Wills-baseball-a-thon! In Part One, we looked at Doris Day’s baseball movies. In Part Two, we covered the Day-Wills love affair.
Today we conclude with a tour covering Wills’ musical career. Get your headphones. You’re in for a treat.
Maury Wills grew up in the 1930s and 1940s in Washington, D.C., so naturally he became a banjo player.
Wait. WHAT? That’s a common reaction to this trio of stories.
A quick history. Wills was a three-sport star in high school, but loved baseball. He signed a $500 contract with the Dodgers in 1950 and while he was successful at every level in the minors, it took nine years to make it to the majors. His last two years in AAA were with the Spokane Indians of the Pacific Coast League. He loved teammate Dick Young’s ukulele playing, so he traded a transistor radio for that uke and a lesson that taught him three chords.
I played that ukulele on the bus on road trips. All of a sudden, I didn’t mind those 20-hour trips. I played in the hotel room. I played from the time I woke up to the time I went to the ballpark - C, F, and G7.
[All quotes are from Wills’ autobiography On The Run: The Never Dull and Often Shocking Life of Maury Wills.]
That uke must have been good luck. It accompanied Wills upon his call-up to the Dodgers in 1959. That off-season, back in Spokane, Wills saw a banjo player at a Shakey’s Pizza Parlor. He loved it, took lessons, and banjo playing became more than just a hobby.
When I first started playing, the banjo was a source of relaxation. Later, when I became a superstar and my life became more complex, I often had troublesome decisions to make. I'd pick up my banjo and start to play and before you knew it, an answer would come to me. I learned to play well enough that all of a sudden, I started getting on the shows and I made money with it.
In the 1962-63 off-season, Wills performed with Milton Berle in Las Vegas. The next year, he had his own show on the main stage at the Sahara, “Maury Wills and Company” with three supporting guitar players and two women singers. Connie Francis was the other headliner.
Frank Sinatra- a regular at Dodger Stadium and big fan of Wills- would single him out in an audience littered with stars.
Wills hobnobbed with Jerry Lewis, Dean Martin, Cary Grant, Dyan Cannon, Charlie Pride, and Johnny Mathis. He performed on Milton Berle’s Hollywood Palace TV show. He and Buddy Rich would play catch in the parking lot between takes.
Back in Vegas, Wills relates his favorite Vegas shout-out.
I’ll never forget the time I saw Sammy Davis, Jr. at the Sands and he sang “The Lady is a Tramp” and made up some of his own words. His parody was, ‘She goes to ball games ‘cause she digs Maury Wills.’ It went on from there. He was talking about Doris Day.
Wills released three singles. Two of which we’ll highlight here. Sorry “Horn of Plenty” b/w “Singin’ The Gospel”, you get left out because I haven’t found a copy yet.
Wills’ first single was from an impromptu recording session with jazz musician Lionel Hampton.
He was cutting a record in a nightclub in Los Angeles and he had this big mobile studio parked outside… Hamp met me and took me outside and made me cut a 45-rmp record with him right on the spot.
The single is dubbed “Maury Wills And His Base Stealers with Lionel Hampton and his All Stars.” I’m guessing vocals from Dodger teammates John Roseboro and Tommy Davis were improvised on the spot. The A-side is a sexual-innuendo laden banger with baseball blather at the end. The B-side tells how happy Wills is to be playing in the majors (Dodgers coach Pete Reiser gets name-checked). No banjo playing, but the Hampton vibes breaks are killer. Despite not having a whole lot of range, Wills’ voice oozes with personality. Super fun. Here’s “Crawdad Hole” b/w “Bye-Bye Blues.”
For his 2nd single, Wills delivers a nice rendition of the folk standard “Wayfarin’ Stranger.” The song was popularized in the 1940s by Burl Ives, hit #7 on the Billboard Country charts in 1980 by Emmylou Harris, was sung by Jack White in Cold Mountain (2003), and was featured in the 2020 video game The Last of Us Part II. Finally we get some hot banjo action on the flip, “The Ballad of Maury Wills.” Here you go:
Through Lionel Hampton, Wills met actress and singer Edie Adams in Las Vegas, with whom he also had a romantic relationship.
I would go to her shows at the Riviera and she would introduce me to the audience every night. She’d call me out on stage, put her arms around me and introduce me. Shecky Greene and all the other guys used to kid me about it.
Hang on.
We all dream of being a professional baseball player. Add in Doris Day/ Edie Adams in your bed, AND Shecky Greene ribbing you… Holy shit, Maury. You were on top of the goddamn world.
On the other hand, you were a pariah because of the color of your skin.
Her job was threatened because I was black. I had heard rumors that I was going to be banned from baseball because of my affair with Doris Day. And now I was seeing Edie Adams. Buzzy Bavasi, the Dodgers’ General Manager, called me into his office and questioned me about it. Things were different than they are now… Edie Adams was one terrific lady… but when I went back to Los Angeles, we lost contact. It just faded away.
Still, Wills appeared on her variety show in October, 1963. I especially love the intro song, which appoints Wills a better thief than Ali Baba, Robin Hood, and Blackbeard the pirate.
Here’s Wills delivering some zingers on that Milton Berle Hollywood Palace TV show.
Here’s a short snippet of Wills fronting a rock band.
One more Maury Wills song for you, “Somebody's Keeping Score” from an album that needs its own post, The Sounds of the Dodgers.
This 1967 Celebrity softball game deserves a full watch, but here’s Wills getting a hit off Jim Garner, fielded by Peter Falk!
Jump to 54:30 for a young Vin Scully interviewing an ascot-clad Wills.
The man had skills. The backs of his baseball cards and these videos leave no doubt.
After his playing days, however, Wills sunk as low as his peak was high. He became a cocaine addict and lost everything he’d gained as a baseball superstar. He was almost 70 before he cleaned himself up enough for the Dodgers to hire him as a spring training base running coach in 2001. A position he held for 15 years.
Wills’ Baseball Hall of Fame candidacy has a decent argument. His 1962 MVP season launched the return of stolen bases not seen since the dead ball era. Upon his retirement in 1972, his 586 stolen bases were the most for any player in the previous 60 years. Of shortstops with over 2,000 hits and 500 stolen bases, he is in a club with only Ozzie Smith, Luis Aparicio, Bert Campaneris, and Jose Reyes. Only three of these guys ever won a gold glove and Wills is one of them.
On the other hand, even before Sabermetrics, writers weren’t buying. His career OPS+ of 88 and 39.6 career WAR (HoFamers generally have over 50 WAR) tell the story in cold hard numbers. Wills’ 1983 arrest for cocaine possession probably cemented his exclusion from surpassing the BBWAA ballot threshold. The 2021 Golden Days Era (1950-1969) Committee similarly left him out of their selection.
One year later, September, 2022, Wills passed away at age 89. He became the 10th Dodger to be honored with a patch on team jerseys.
Back to December of 2015. Wills attended baseball’s Winter Meetings in Nashville. Not uncommon for a baseball lifer, but that year Wills’ banjo - the one he’d played for Milton Berle, for Johnny Carson, for Dinah Shore, for Mike Douglas, and surely for Doris Day and Edie Adams - was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.
In his biography, Wills posits how people loved his singing and banjo playing, as long as he was a baseball star. Not so much after that. His post-baseball life was a disaster of drugs and loneliness for decades. Maury Wills solved baseball and banjo playing. But it took him 70 years to figure out how to just live life.
His story has me asking big questions. Where do we learn how to maintain adult relationships? How do we acquire the right balance of self-esteem and self-awareness to keep ourselves afloat? What motivates us to fight boredom and go back to working on doing the things we love?
Maury loved the banjo and I hope he was playing the fuck out of it right up until the day he passed.
Great piece Jay! SO much interesting stuff. Interesting dude. Singing at Torre's wedding- wow. Hangin' and banging' with the Rat Pack- wow. Must've been a good musician or all the guys on that bus woulda tossed that thing out onto the highway.
Mr. Wills was a man of many talents! Love this series!