Yankees Want Steinbrenner Letters to Stay in a Dresser

Posted by Sabrina B. @gametimegirl

The 19 letters describe an innocent 60-year-old story of the friendship between a collegian named George Steinbrenner and Mary Jane Elster, a girl two years his junior.
Despite the letters’ chasteness, the Yankees are emphatically refusing to let the woman, now Mary Jane Schriner, use them in a small book about the relationship, which began in 1949 when she was 16 and living in Bay Village, Ohio, that she has been asked to collaborate on.

Lonn Trost, the Yankees’ chief operating officer, told Schriner’s son Michael in an e-mail last month that “regardless of anyone’s intent,” publication of the letters “will cause untold embarrassment and damages to the Steinbrenner family and the Steinbrenner’s business interests.” Trost declined to say what offended the family.

“We just think it’s insensitive and because of that it would be inappropriate to proceed on their request,” Trost said in an interview on Wednesday.

Michael Schriner said he was angry and perplexed by the Yankees’ decision.

“Lonn could not have been more of a bully,” Michael Schriner said. “George looks so great in the letters. We wanted his kids to see the letters. But no one wants to mess with the Steinbrenners. People are afraid of them.”

Mary Jane Schriner, who is 77, said: “Michael was offended. I’m too old to be.”

In addition to denying her permission to use the letters, Trost asked the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum not to display copies of the letters.

The Hall learned of them when The New York Times published one of them, along with an essay by Mary Jane Schriner, two days after Steinbrenner’s death on July 13. At the time, Randy Levine, the Yankees’ president, objected to The Times’s use of the letter.

She offered a possible reason for Trost’s threatening directive not to publish the letters, which she kept in a dresser drawer until she learned that Steinbrenner had died. There were about 60 letters at one time, she said; the others were lost over the years.

“I tried to put myself in George’s wife’s position,” she said, referring to Joan Steinbrenner. “Maybe it’s hurtful to hear that someone else had a relationship with him. But I was 16. There’s nothing in those letters to upset her. They’re sort of boring.”

She said that one goal of sending copies of the letters to the Steinbrenners was to give them a new insight into her old friend.

“But that was misconstrued, unless they never saw them,” she said.

The letters were written mostly in pen; in one, he apologizes for writing in pencil but says that he cannot afford a pen and that his roommates wanted to charge him $1 to use theirs.

In what were usually two-page letters, the young Steinbrenner comes off as gentlemanly and impatient; hopeful that he could spend time with Schriner on trips home from Williams College and wishing that she wrote back as frequently as he wrote to her.

He wondered once why she did not seem crazy about him.

“I don’t know if it was a friendship or a romance,” she said Wednesday from her home in Westlake, Ohio. “One problem is, I was Catholic and he wasn’t.”

Steinbrenner confided in her his concerns about the coming Korean War, his frustration at losing hurdling races to Harrison Dillard, and the black eye he got in a dorm brawl. “There’s nothing mean in the letters,” she said. “He was always nice.”

The youthful sentiments expressed by Steinbrenner were what led Bill Gutman, a veteran book writer, to see if Schriner wanted to work together on a small book about her time with the future Yankees owner. The book would have used the letters, her reminiscences and his reporting to help recreate the era of the friendship.

“It seemed like a very nice story that would have shown New Yorkers a whole different side of George Steinbrenner,” he said. “It would have been a sweet memoir. I thought the Yankees might say go ahead and want to see the manuscript.”

But using the letters was contingent on the Yankees and the Steinbrenner family’s agreeing to Schriner’s request even though they had been hers all these years. In denying Schriner the right to use the letters, the Yankees were acting to enforce the Steinbrenner family’s ownership of the letters’ content.

“The person who wrote the letters has a copyright to them and the recipient is the owner of the physical copy,” said Diane Zimmerman, a professor at the New York University School of Law and a copyright law expert. “There’s a difference between ownership of the content and ownership of the vehicle the content is embodied in.”

She said the squabble between Schriner and the Yankees was similar to J. D. Salinger’s successful legal fight to prevent the writer of an unauthorized biography about him from quoting from copyrighted letters that he had written between 1939 and 1961. Their owners had deposited them in university libraries.

Although she cannot publish the letters, Schriner can sell them, Zimmerman said.

And that is, apparently, her plan.

“I don’t need to keep them anymore,” she said. She is blind in one eye and is losing the vision in the other. “Pretty soon, I won’t be able to read them,” she added.

In the meantime, Schriner has written a new essay about her relationship with Steinbrenner, which is available on her blog. In it, she recalls going on a date with Steinbrenner and another couple. They saw “Twelve O’Clock High,” chatted at a nearby ice cream parlor and drove in Steinbrenner’s convertible with the top down as “night breezes circled me like a silken shawl,” Schriner writes.

As they waited for the other couple to say goodnight, Steinbrenner and Schriner remained in the car. He slipped his arm around her shoulder and drew her face close to his.

“What are you doing?” she said.

“I’m going to kiss you,” he said.

“Without another word, I grabbed my purse, flew out of the car and proceeded to walk the block to my house,” she writes. Steinbrenner followed her, and she heard him shout: “Please get back in the car. If my parents find out about this, I’m in big trouble.”
-By RICHARD SANDOMIR