An Autograph Seeker Who Never Pays

The memorabilia show with a baseball signed by Mickey Mantle “before� his death was the object of some kidding here the other day. After all, when else would he have signed it? Well, Brent Maddox of Venice recalls that the Mick broached that very topic in a joke he used to tell during personal appearances.

Mantle would relate how he dies and finds himself at the Pearly Gates, where St. Peter tells him: “Sorry, Mick, you haven’t lived the most virtuous of lives.�

But that isn’t the end of it. St. Peter adds: “God wants you to stick around for 20 minutes. He has some baseballs for you to sign.�

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WRONG SIGN-OFF: The subject of Mantle autographs brought back somewhat painful memories for Al Hattal of Marina del Rey. To his surprise, he was staying at the same San Francisco hotel as the New York Yankees during the 1962 World Series. Seeing the players at breakfast, Hattal ran out to purchase a baseball and returned in time to have Mantle, Roger Maris and several other players sign it (for no charge, too).

The painful part? The fate of the once-pristine ball.

“When I returned home I showed it to my 5- and 7-year-old sons, never thinking of warning them not to play with it,� Hattal said. “But, of course, they did. Gotta be the dumbest mistake I ever made.�

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DON’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT GEOGRAPHY: Joe Quinn of Santa Barbara noticed that a Chicago newspaper obituary of singer Carl Perkins said that in 1967 “he gave up alcohol, throwing his last whiskey bottle into the Pacific Ocean near Encino, Calif.� Even Mickey Mantle would have had trouble throwing a bottle over that many miles of land.

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TAKING THE LOW ROAD? Ed Kysar of Torrance found convincing evidence in the “entertainment� ads of a weekly newspaper that some cable channels run fare that belongs in the sewer (see accompanying).

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WATER WHIRL: About five years ago, this column printed an invitation to the wedding of Hollywood agent Jay Bernstein and model Cabrina Finn--your average, everyday wedding except perhaps for the fact that it was staged underwater in the French West Indies and filmed for TV’s “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous� (see accompanying).

Skin Diver magazine was invited, but not your Only in L.A. columnist. So I can’t tell you, for instance, whether Carl Perkins’ whiskey bottle floated by. But I always wondered how the couple was getting along.

Alas, the other night I was watching a Carrie Fisher special on A&E; about Hollywood marriages and there was Bernstein talking about how the marriage had ended in divorce after barely more than a year. I never did find out how they cut the cake.

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SOUNDS LIKE . . . An item here about the phrase “death forces� appearing as “deaf horses� in a newspaper ad moved David Plenn of South Pasadena to recollect a boo-boo that showed up some years ago in a weekly where he worked.

“A woman taking ads over the phone took one that was supposed to start with ‘Divorce Forces Sale--everything must go!’ The ad she typed said, ‘Divorced Horses Sale--everything must go!’ �

He adds that the divorcee was plenty angry afterward. No, not the horse! The person!

miscelLAny:

It happened 10 years ago today--a truck carrying 44,000 pounds of Kansas pig carcasses overturned on the Golden State Freeway, spilling everything. It was L.A.’s all-time PigAlert.

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Steve Harvey can be reached by phone at (213) 237-7083, by fax at (213) 237-4712, by e-mail at [email protected] and by mail at Metro, L.A. Times, Times Mirror Square, L.A. 90053.