The First Lady of Baseball
Bygone Baseball by
C. Philip Francis
She hated baseball, and never saw a regularly scheduled game until she met one of the most famous personalities in the game of baseball. Her name is Laraine Day, and had to learn the game from ground up when she became Mrs. Leo Durocher. You may remember her as a movie actress or a television and radio commentator. And if you go back that far, you might know her as Nurse Mary Lamont, the fiancé of Lew Ayres in the “Dr. Kildare” series. Miss Day, however, left the glitter of Hollywood when she married the brash and pugnacious baseball player and manager, and gave her life to marriage and baseball. This is her story.
She was born as La Raine Johnson on October 13, 1920 in Roosevelt, Utah, the daughter of Clarence Irwin Johnson and Ada M. Johnson, and one of eight children. Her father had been mayor, a prosperous grain dealer, and worked as a government agent for the Ute Indians for twenty years. La Raine wanted to become an actress ever since she saw her first motion picture at the age of six. In 1931 the family left Utah for Long Beach, California where she joined the Players’ Guild managed by Elias Day who gave her the needed dramatic training. In 1938 the promising performer took his surname in appreciation, and changed her birth name from La Raine to Laraine.
The new Loraine Day made her screen debut by saying four lines in the1937 production of Stella Dallas that starred Barbara Stanwyck. Paramount signed the youthful actress for a small part, but then dropped her for “lack of talent.” However, she soon had lead parts in several RKO westerns before given “critical praise” for her role in My Son, My Son (1940). In 1941 she was chosen as the best in a poll of “Stars of Tomorrow” that also included Rita Hayworth, Jackie Cooper, and some fellow named Ronald Reagan. The lady who had “little talent” went on to appear in 35 medium-budget pictures in the 1940’s and 1950’s including Tarzan Finds a Son (1939), Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent (1939), Journey for Margaret (1942), Mr. Lucky (1943) with Cary Grant, and John Wayne’s The High and the Mighty (1954).
In 1942 Miss Day married James Ray Hendricks, an executive at the Santa Monica airport, and adopted two girls and a boy. It was in this period of time that Mr. and Mrs. Hendricks met Leo Durocher, the manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers. In 1946 Loraine told her husband that she had fallen in love with Leo, and wanted a divorce. Hendricks, in turn claimed that Durocher was a homewrecker, and became friends only to steal the actress. Miss Day went to Mexico in January of 1947 for a divorce, and then quickly wed Durocher. She then repeated both the divorce to Hendricks and marriage to Durocher in the United States. Loraine had not only been called an adulteress, but as the new Mrs. Durocher she found herself in the middle of a baseball maelstrom
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The feisty Durocher had been in baseball since 1925 when he first came up with the New York Yankees as an infielder. He finished his big league career with the Brooklyn Dodgers 1945, and put in 25 years as the manager of Brooklyn, the New York Giants, Chicago Cubs, and Houston. Leo has never been called a nice guy, and even a famous columnist thought him to be a “moral delinquent.” In spite of his deficiencies Leo was also extremely smart, articulate and would do anything to win – anything.
One of his best friends was Hollywood actor George Raft who had connections with mobsters and professional gamblers. In 1947 then baseball Commissioner Happy Chandler suspended the controversial manager for the entire season for “conduct detrimental to baseball.” He returned the next year, but shocked the baseball world when he joined his hated rivals – the New York Giants.
At this time Miss Day noted, “The move from Brooklyn to New York marked a definite change in my life. Before that I had been commuting between Hollywood and New York and now I settled down to baseball.” She claimed that when she was first introduced to Leo she did not know anything about baseball of the Dodgers, and began reading all she could find on baseball “with the exception of the rulebook.” Loraine’s husband told her stories about the players, and she became an avid lover of baseball.
Loraine dove into the game with gusto. She stressed the human interest, the player personalities, and shunned numbers saying, “Baseball is not a lot of statistics to me, it’s blood and tears.” Loraine never felt that she really belonged until she was invited to the 1951 annual dinner of the New York chapter of the Baseball Writers’ Association – the first woman ever to be honored. Some referred to her as The First Lady of Baseball.
She began a fifteen-minute sports interview on television before all New York Giants home games in an effort to interest and encourage new female fans in the Giants and in baseball. Variety, an entertainment paper, gave this review of Loraine’s first telecast, “…her good looks, infectious personality, and better-than speaking acquaintance with baseball…” In 1953 Leo and his wife filmed 40 fifteen-minute video shorts called Double Play with Durocher and Day that featured interviews with both baseball notables and those from other sports.
Miss Day said that she always rooted for her husband’s team, but never against the other team because it was “tactless and unsporting.” The five-foot, five-inch film actress never smoked, nor did she drink coffee, tea, or alcohol, and had this to say about her conversion from movies to baseball, “Let someone else be he world’s greatest actress. I’ll be the world’s greatest baseball fan.”
Leo Durocher died on October 7, 1991 at the age of 81, and was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1994. The October 13, 2001 issue of the London, England Independent noted that Loraine Day was celebrating her 81st birthday.