Joe, You Coulda Made Us Proud

by Joe Pepitone

  It turned out that she had checked on me with her Bunny friends I had been dating. The reports on me did not appeal to Stevie. Not only that, all of a sudden none of the Bunnies would go out with me. Maybe, I thought, Chicago’s not my kind of town after all.

  But a couple of weeks later I walked into a club called Mothers and saw Stevie sitting at a table with a girl friend named Suzie. I went over and started talking to them. While I was standing there, a guy came by and asked them to dance. They declined. “That’s the fourth in the last five minutes,” said Stevie, and she asked me to sit with them. They’d just come to listen to the music; neither felt like dancing.

  Another guy walked over and asked if either of them wanted to dance. “Listen, sweetie,” I lisped, “the girls don’t want to be bothered with you.”

  The next guy who came over asked Stevie to dance, and she said, “I’m with him,” pointing to me. So he asked Suzie, who said, “I’m with him,” pointing to me. In a few minutes all the single guys in the place seemed to get the message. We weren’t bothered any more, and for the first time I really had a chance to rap with Stevie. She went home with me that night, and we started dating.

  But she was an independent bitch, and half the time she wouldn’t even show up. I’d appear at the club where we were supposed to meet, and she wouldn’t. I’d find her across the street at The Gap listening to music. She’d be sitting down front next to the bongo player, and I’d get pissed off. Still, I really dug her, and we began seeing more and more of one another.

  I was finally beginning to tire of all the partying, banging around night after night. It was nice to get close to someone and want to be with them most of the time. In a couple of months Stevie began leaving some of her clothes at my apartment. Gradually, more of her things were at my place. One morning in the spring, a steamer trunk arrived. Followed shortly by Stevie. “Joe, I might as well save the fifty-dollars-a-month rent I pay at the Mansion,” she said. It was lovely.

  I had met Stevie’s sister when she was a Bunny at the Playboy Club in Kansas City several years before. We had spent a weekend together. I didn’t know it was her sister until Stevie told me, and I couldn’t believe it. “It’s true,” she said.

  “Did she say I was good?” I asked.

  “Yes, Joe, she said you were good.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She said you started at the toes and worked up,” said Stevie. “I told her you used to be good.”

  “I was younger then.”

  I kept trying to get into the Playboy Mansion after Stevie told me how nice it was. But Hugh Hefner was very careful about who he invited in. Stevie couldn’t help at all. One night my cousin Joe Scandora, who is Don Rickles’s manager, was in town. He took me into the Mansion, and it was everything that Stevie had said it was. We went there with Rickles and Finest Henderson, who ran the Theatre in the Round in Chicago. Finest and I wandered into a room with a magnificent pool table.

  “You shoot a lot of pool growing up in Brooklyn, Joe?” said Finest. “I bet you’re a shark.”

  “I’m good, Finest,” I said.

  “Well let’s play a little straight pool, Joe.”

  He broke, played safe, but a ball came out of the pack that left me a break shot. I banged in the ball and busted open the rack. Then I started popping the balls in. I ran twelve before I missed. I chalked my cue stick and said, “Finest, you don’t know it, but I was born on a pool table.”

  “And that,” said Finest, smiling, “is where you’re gonna die.” He ran fifty balls. Click, click, click . . . Game.

  My first spring training in Arizona was fun, and productive. After ten years in the major leagues, I was finally beginning to study pitchers, make mental notes of what to expect from them in given situations. In the past I’d always just gone up there swinging, never thinking about what kind of pitch a guy was most likely to throw me. Anticipating sure made hitting a lot easier.

  The only problem I had was that Barbara had finally remarried, which helped financially, but her new husband wanted to adopt my children. That was one thing I swore I would never allow—taking my name away from my children. It was bad enough losing my kids without having them bearing somebody else’s name. My family felt the same way, particularly my Aunt Fifi, who had raised my brother Billy. She kept telling me, “Never—never give up your kids forever. If they don’t carry your name, you lose them forever. You have a son, Joseph Anthony Pepitone, Jr. Let him keep your name.” Fifi loved children, having never had any, and I felt the same way she did about my kids and my name.

  Barbara’s attorney hit me with a subpoena on our first trip to San Francisco to play the Giants. I had to go before a judge regarding the application for adoption, which really broke me up. Stevie had made the trip to the Coast with me, thank goodness. I needed her.

  My attorney, Bill Sherr, pushed me to sign the papers. What he said made eminent sense: “Your daughter knows who you are. When she gets older, she’ll come to see you if she wants to. She knows you are her father. But her new father is with her and Joseph all the time. You’re all the way across the country and almost never see them. It will be better for the children if they take their stepfather’s name.”

  “No way,” I told him. “I’m not signing away my daughter and my son to some stranger. To anyone. They are my children. I just can’t do it.”

  Sherr kept after me, though, as he engaged in negotiations with Barbara’s attorney to make a flat final settlement with her on child support payments. Finally I gave in. Not because of the money. Not because of Sherr’s rationale on the benefits to the kids. I gave in because I hoped it would relieve some of the pressure in my head over the children. I did it for me, feeling maybe it would get them off my mind.

  Late in the spring, Sherr negotiated a settlement figure of $20,000. The Cubs advanced me a check in that amount (to be deducted from my salary, which was now over $50,000 a year). I had to take it to Barbara in person and sign the check in front of her and her attorney. That was it. I no longer owed her anything. I no longer had any children by her. Case closed. I only cried for a week.

  For perhaps the first time in my life, though, I didn’t come apart in a bad moment. I didn’t go berserk. I was feeling together living with Stevie, who understood, who comforted, who was good to be with. She was only a child herself in years, just twenty, but she was so much older intellectually and emotionally.

  I had opened the season with a hot bat, and I stayed hot, which helped my head. I saw Billy Williams, a great hitter, studying movies of himself at bat, so every few days I started watching films of myself hitting. It allowed me to pick up any little thing I might be doing differently at the plate and correct the flaw in the game that afternoon. My batting average was over .300, and I was truly enjoying baseball.

  Even when Diane hauled me into court to get her support payments raised to $175 a week, I didn’t get upset. I told all the guys in the clubhouse, “That’s all right, I can be happy on twenty-three dollars a week.”

  Glenn Beckert, who I liked to kid with, said, “The next time your wife needs a witness, she can call me.”

  “Which wife?” said Bill Hands.

  “Smart aleck,” I said. “I’m rid of the first one. The second one, she’ll get married someday, too. She’s a good-looking woman.”

  “When are you getting married again?” someone asked.

  “The next time I marry, it’ll be to a man.” I said, “And with my luck, he’ll get pregnant.”

  The one thing that annoyed me was that I chipped a bone in my left elbow making a throw from the outfield on a cold day, and it hurt me all season. The chip irritated a nerve, and the pain got so bad that I couldn’t throw a ball across a room. Leo moved me in to first base, which I still liked better than the outfield, but on May 19 I had to go on the disabled list for fifteen days and just rest my arm.

  I had always been a streak hitter. When I came off the disabled list I went on a streak that lasted throug
h nineteen games, which even I found incredible. I batted .429 in those nineteen games and raised my average to .350—third best in the National League. Not surprisingly, the writers swarmed around me.

  “Man, I’m just a lousy two fifty-nine hitter [my lifetime average],” I told them all. “I’m not a superstar. I’m a stupid star.”

  Before I went o-for-4 against John Cumberland of the Giants on June 22, several writers actually asked me if I thought I had a shot at breaking Joe DiMaggio’s major-league record of hitting in fifty-six consecutive games. I laughed.

  “Joe D’s my hero, my all-time idol,” I told them. “But let’s suppose I did hit in fifty-five games in a row. Now, I know it’s not going to happen. But if it did, I’d quit, because there’s no way I’d want to break his record.” That was bullshit, of course, but it gave the guys something to write. If I had ever hit in fifty-five consecutive games they would have dragged me off to jail, because they would have known I was on something.

  The best thing about the streak was that we won thirteen of those nineteen games. Unfortunately, we couldn’t come close to that pace the rest of the way. We finished tied with the Mets for third place in the National League’s Eastern Division. Although my bad elbow cost me some of my power at the plate and I hit only sixteen home runs, I did bat over .300—.307—for the first time in the majors. If I hadn’t missed the last three weeks of the season, I would have had closer to eighty RBIs than the sixty-one I ended up with. About a month after the season, I had the bone chip removed in Wesley Memorial Hospital, where I read rumors that the Cubs were trying to trade me. Christ, I thought, I bat .300 for the first time and my team’s trying to trade me?

  Then I read a story that quoted John Holland, the Cubs’ general manager, to the effect that the rumors were nonsense. “It may come as a surprise to some people, but Pepitone is the best clutch hitter we have,” said Holland, which surprised me. “We keep statistics on such things and they reveal that Joe has the best percentage, insofar as hitting with men on base is concerned, of anybody on the ball club. As a matter of fact, I believe that our poor showing in the final six weeks would not have happened if Pepitone had been physically sound. We missed his clutch hitting. With him, we might have been in the fight for the division title right down to the end.”

  Thanks, John, I thought. Remember those words at contract time.

  I needed more money because I had decided to open a lounge in Chicago. I had talked to Ron Santo, who, with his business manager-partner, had been very successful in starting businesses in the city. I asked them if they wanted to be partners in my place. They declined, but arranged a forty-thousand-dollar loan for me. It was going to be a nice little saloon which I would call, “Joe Pepitone’s Thing.” When the team was in town, I could be there nightly to observe what was going on, something I couldn’t do with “Joe Pepitone’s My Place” after I was traded. I had sure as hell been in enough saloons over the last decade to know what ingredients were necessary to make one a success. And ninety percent of the profits would be mine. For the help Ron and his partner gave me in getting the bank financing, I gave each of them five percent of the club.

  “We’ll tell all our friends to come and see your thing,” said Ron, giggling.

  XXI

  “Look, the Chicago Zoo is three blocks away”

  John Holland remembered his words. The contract I signed for the ’72 season called for a salary of $60,000. I moved into a two-bedroom penthouse apartment and spent all my time getting “Joe Pepitone’s Thing” ready to open.

  I had no trouble at all getting my liquor license, which is a lengthy, runaround procedure in New York City. My attorney in Chicago, Sam Banks, who knows everyone in the city, sent me to see a guy in Mayor Daley’s office, and he pushed the whole thing through in a matter of days. The license cost me 217 autographs. I had to pass through every other office in city hall and sign for everyone in them.

  I was now kind of sorry that I had fired Fabulous Howard, because he really knew how to get publicity, and a new lounge needs all it can get. One morning during the ’71 season, he had called me from downstairs about an hour early. I looked at my watch and said, “Shit, Fabulous, we don’t have to leave for the ball park yet.”

  “Joe, get down here right away,” he said. “I’ve got a surprise for you. You’re going to love it.”

  I got dressed, went down to the lobby, and saw a whole crowd of people gathered by the limousine parked at the curb. About a dozen newspapermen and television reporters. Fabulous saw me and hit the horn. As soon as I stepped out the door, he gave a little flip with his hands and the red carpet he held began unrolling toward me. The carpet tumbled over and over until it flattened at my feet, and written on the end of it were the words THE FANTASTIC PEPITONE.

  He was fun, and I hated to fire a guy I wasn’t even paying. But I caught his act on a television program one morning, and he made me mad as hell. He said that he was responsible for my having my first good season in years, that he had made me what I was in Chicago. When he came to pick me up that day, I said, “You got some pair of balls.”

  “You saw the show, Joe?” he said. “Don’t let it bother you. No matter what I say, it’s good for you, Joe.”

  “Oh, yeah?” I said, seething. “Well let me hear you say, ‘Good-bye.’ Because I don’t want to see you again.”

  The press enjoyed his act, and Fabulous would have been an asset in the weeks before I opened the lounge on New Year’s Eve. As it turned out, “Joe Pepitone’s Thing” didn’t need any extra publicity. We were packed opening night, and stayed packed for eight or nine months, often with people lined up outside waiting to get in.

  The club was small, long, and narrow, and located on Division Street, just off Rush, in the swingingest section of Chicago. You entered the lounge by walking down a flight of stairs carpeted with Astroturf, opened a door into a little foyer, then another door into the place itself. There was a high-chair bar on one side of the room, and a balcony with tables on the other side. A railing of black baseball bats separated the tables from the main floor. The walls were full of black-and-white photos of me in action, and a large oil painting of your host in a Cub uniform. We had no food and no live music, just a jukebox. The bartenders and waitresses were all attractive girls. They were not burdened by a lot of cumbersome clothing.

  We drew a terrific athlete crowd. Most of the guys from the local teams—the Cubs, the White Sox, the Bears, the Bulls, the Black Hawks—as well as visiting players stopped in. And the lounge quickly earned a reputation as a place where stewardesses hung out, which was true. As any innkeeper knows, when you got the girls—you get the guys.

  I had a few initial problems, which were to be expected in any business where you served drinks. My manager wasn’t up to the task. I fired him and brought Dominic, who was separated from his wife, and my brother Billy, who was accompanied by his wife, in from New York to manage the place for me. Dominic had plenty of experience in running a club, and Billy is very sharp. They did a great job.

  We had one night that would have been a total disaster without them. I had been having trouble with the waitresses and bartenders for several weeks. Customers were complaining that they couldn’t get service because the girls were spending too much time socializing with certain guys. I saw that the customers were right. I warned the girls that they had to tend to business or they were going to have to go. “Right on, Joe,” they said. But the complaints not only continued, they increased. Then one Friday evening I walked into the lounge, and the first four customers I passed said the same thing, “Hey, Joe, what do I have to do to get a drink in here?” I saw that two of the waitresses and one of the bartenders were just standing around talking to guys, while the other customers stood there with empty glasses in their hands and annoyed looks on their faces. I got furious. I yelled for quiet, and said I was sorry but we had just lost all of our waitresses and bartenders. I fired all of them.

  That left us with a serious problem,
of course, and I asked everyone to please bear with us. Dominic and I went behind the bar, and Billy worked the floor. Dominic knew how to mix drinks. My total drink-mixing repertoire consisted of whiskey and water. I’ll be damned if my first customer wasn’t a chick who ordered a weird drink.

  “What was that you ordered, Miss?” I asked.

  “A banshee.”

  “A what?”

  “A banshee.”

  “Look, do me a favor,” I said. “The Chicago Zoo is three blocks away. I think you’ll find one of those in cage nineteen.”

  Then a guy ordered a sloe gin fizz. “Pal,” I said, “would you like that beer in a fucking glass?”

  For the rest of the night, if anyone ordered anything except a beer, I served the same drink. “What’ll you have?”

  “One martini, one screwdriver, and two stingers.”

  “Right.”

  “Hey, these all taste like Scotch and water.”

  “We lost all our barmaids this afternoon,” I’d say. “You have four or five of those, they’ll sting you.”

  A few people walked out, most laughed and drank up, or squeezed down toward Dominic. But we got through it. The next morning I hired a whole new crew of girls, and everything was fine.

  Things were anything but fine with the Cubs. I had a good spring in Arizona, Stevie was with me, the lounge was making money and I felt I was going to have a big season. The Cubs had traded for Rick Monday and Jose Cardenal, both center fielders, so I was being switched back to first base permanently. My arm was strong again, and I was swinging the bat well. Then the Players’ Association called a strike and we went out for two weeks. When we came back, the season started, and I had completely lost my timing at the plate. I couldn’t hit a goddamn thing. I was coming off a .300 season, I expected to be super, and I couldn’t get good wood on the ball no matter what I tried. I started pressing. In the first five games my batting average was .125.

  But most of the guys weren’t hitting. Everyone’s timing was off. I was shocked when we went to New York to play the Mets on April 23 and saw that my name wasn’t on the lineup card. It really pissed me off. I wasn’t going to start hitting while sitting on the bench. Six guys weren’t hitting, and Leo benched me. Why me? I thought. I felt like a scapegoat. Here I’d been happy in Chicago for a year and a half, had really busted my butt trying to do the right thing, to concentrate and play good ball, and I’d succeeded—only to be benched. Suddenly I felt shitty again, because the benching not only seemed unfair, it didn’t make any sense at all to me.