Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning_1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City

by Jonathan Mahler

  The word was that Reggie was asking for $3 million for five years, an unprecedented sum that turned off more than a few owners. There was the additional concern that paying one player so much would foster ill will among the rest of the team. “I will not demoralize this club over Jackson,” said M. Donald Grant, the chairman of the Mets. Steinbrenner’s main competition in the Reggie Jackson sweepstakes was the burger baron Ray Kroc, owner of the San Diego Padres, and Seagram’s heir Charles Bronfman, of the Montreal Expos. Kroc offered $3.4 million over five years; Bronfman said he was prepared to go all the way to $5 million.

  Jackson decided to sign with the Yankees for a lot less. The Daily News explained it thus: “While George’s competition was offering nothing more than filthy lucre, George offered filthy New York—beautiful, big, bustling, exciting, pressurized, hurrying, unfunctioning, sexy, cultured, glamorous, filthy New York.”

  Not that there wouldn’t be filthy lucre: $2.9 million over five years, plus an additional $63,000 for a custom-made Rolls-Royce Corniche. It averaged out to $580,000 a year—less than O. J. Simpson, Jimmy Connors, and Julius Erving, but more than anyone else in baseball, or for that matter, the history of baseball.

  “If this is Americana, we lost the Revolution,” an architecture critic once observed of the European-themed banquet rooms of New York’s Americana Hotel. It was in the gaudiest of the lot, the chandelier-encrusted Versailles Room, that the Yankees crowned their new king on November 29, 1976.

  Reggie wore a brass-buttoned three-piece gray flannel suit designed by Geoffrey Beene (who was about to roll out a new line of Reggie Jackson menswear), a sky blue shirt, a wide, dark blue tie flecked with gold leaves, and black alligator shoes. A gold bracelet with R-E-G-G-I-E spelled out in diamonds sparkled on his right wrist, a few inches above one of his three Oakland A’s World Series rings.

  “Here is the replacement for Babe Ruth,” the World-Tellegram’s Dan Daniel, dean of the press box, had written when twenty-one-year-old Joe DiMaggio first appeared in New York forty years earlier. Now it was Reggie’s turn. The two men couldn’t have had less in common. DiMag was tall and slender, strong and silent—“slow to smile and reluctant to speak,” as his biographer Richard Ben Cramer wrote. His face was blank, like an actor awaiting his lines.

  Reggie had already written and memorized his. “I didn’t come to New York to become a star,” he told the crowd, “I brought my star with me.” He seemed more like the replacement for a different joe—Joe Namath, who was conveniently on his way to Los Angeles to finish out his career with the Rams. They both were miniskirt-chasing bachelors—Namath’s penchant for black women matched Reggie’s taste for blondes—with rocket launchers dangling from their sculpted shoulders and the cocksuredness to guarantee the city victory. “I’m going to be working the World Series, either for the Yankees or for ABC,” Reggie told the assembled masses, “and I don’t think I’m going to be in the broadcasting booth.”

  Even the editorial page of the New York Times took note of his arrival. “Reggie Jackson is a flamboyant man whose self–confidence is matched only by his athletic ability,” the paper editorialized on December 2, 1976. “By choosing New York, Jackson has become the Yankees’ first black superstar, not to mention their first black millionaire.”

  Reggie Jackson’s new manager, Billy Martin, followed the Steinbrenner-Jackson courtship in the papers with a growing sense of disgust. He’d had his eye on a different free agent outfielder, Joe Rudi, a soft-spoken right-handed hitter who fielded his position much better than Jackson. Of course, no one in the front office had asked him.

  Reggie was the kind of player who liked to draw attention to himself, the kind of player that Martin tended not to like, and over the years he’d directed more than one of his pitchers to throw at Jackson. But what bothered the fatherless Martin most was all the attention that Steinbrenner had lavished on Jackson. “George was taking Reggie to the ‘21’ Club for lunch all the time, and I was sitting in my hotel room the entire winter and George hadn’t taken me out to lunch even once,” Martin later complained in his autobiography.

  If Martin was looking for a reason to mistrust the newest member of his team, he didn’t need to look far. Never one to miss a slight, Martin noticed that Jackson had told one of the reporters that he was excited about coming to New York because he and “George” got along so well. “You’re going to find out George isn’t the manager,” thought Martin.

  7.

  ON a cold, snowy night in the waning days of 1976, former New York congresswoman and noted liberal firebrand Bella Abzug summoned her closest confidants to her red-brick town house on Bank Street in Greenwich Village. After stomping the snow out of their boots and stripping off their overcoats, they filed into the parlor, which, with its worn velvet couches and peeling red paint, resembled nothing so much as a Venetian bordello. It was time to discuss Bella’s future.

  The question was whether she should run for mayor. Private balloting would have revealed a landslide against the notion. “Most of us were there to say that we were exhausted and that we hoped she wasn’t going to do this,” says Harold Holzer, who had been Congresswoman Abzug’s press secretary.

  Nearly everyone in the room was still recovering from Abzug’s grueling 1976 Senate campaign. It had been a bad idea from the start. At the time Abzug was one of the most powerful members of Congress, which is to say that she’d come a long way since her arrival in Washington in 1970. She’d started her congressional tenure by offending the House doorkeeper—when he asked her to remove her ubiquitous hat before stepping onto the floor, she’d reportedly told him to go fuck himself-and then moved on to the president. Meeting Nixon for the first time at a black-tie dinner for freshman members of Congress at the White House, she told him her constituents were very unhappy that he hadn’t withdrawn from Vietnam. “We’re doing better than our predecessors,” Nixon replied, pumping her hand and smiling. “Well, your predecessors didn’t do very well, but you’re doing worse and we have to withdraw immediately,” said Abzug. Nixon quickly moved her on toward his wife, Pat. “Oh, I’ve been looking forward to meeting you,” the first lady said. “I’ve read all about your cute little bonnet.”

  The House of Representatives- “a male, white, middle-aged, middle- and upper-class power elite that stand with their backs turned to the needs and demands of our people,” as Abzug described it—was a far cry from the Upper West Side that had elected her. The joke around Congress went that asking Abzug to sponsor a piece of legislation was the best way to ensure its defeat. It wasn’t exactly a joke: A researcher for Ralph Nader determined that her sponsorship was enough to cost a bill between twenty and thirty votes. Abzug’s popularity with her colleagues sank to a new low in 1972, when her district was gerrymandered and she chose to run for reelection against William Fitts Ryan, a beloved elder stateman of New York’s liberal reform movement who was battling throat cancer and could barely speak. Ryan won the race but lost the fight against cancer and died before he could be sworn in. In a special election to replace Ryan, Abzug beat his grieving widow.

  Then the tides began to turn. As the seventies wore on, many of the causes that Abzug had been carrying on about—namely women’s rights, gay rights, government secrecy, the war in Vietnam, and the nuclear arms race—no longer sounded so controversial. The erstwhile pariah became an emblem of the triumph of liberalism. “No one better than she reflects such success as the new politics has had,” wrote the editors of The New Republic. “Gutsy and shrewd, she has earned the esteem and, in Congress, the cooperation of people who at first disdained her as a kook.” Always a nervous eater, Abzug became larger-than-life as well as large. She cut a memorable figure playing in House volleyball games in her jodhpurs and white sailor’s cap, which she’d had specially made by a clothing designer in Connecticut.

  Abzug’s place in Congress could not have been more secure. There was no good reason to give it up, especially to run for the Senate. Winning votes in the hostile hinterl
ands, where radical Jewish feminists were as alien as skyscrapers, would be next to impossible, which explains why Abzug and her staff spent 104 consecutive weekends crisscrossing the state, visiting each of its sixty-four counties. Arriving in one rural county in the northern reaches of New York, Abzug was informed that there had been a threat on her life. The following morning she ordered one of her aides to take the first sip of her orange juice.

  With four other legitimate Democratic candidates in the primary, the competition for endorsements had been fierce. After much deliberation, the Times’s editorial page editor, John Oakes, settled on Abzug. The paper’s publisher, Punch Sulzberger, wasn’t happy with the choice. An aggressively assimilated descendant of German Jews, Sulzberger didn’t like Abzug’s loudmouthed, yenta style, the way she called people bubelah when she scolded them. He vetoed the Abzug endorsement and ordered up a new editorial in support of her principal opponent, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who wound up edging her out by a mere 1 percent.

  It was Ramsey Clark who played the spoiler. He was a long shot, but his left-wing credentials—as a lawyer he had defended the inmates at Attica and the students at Kent State—positioned him to snatch votes from Abzug. He also snatched a deep-pocketed celebrity supporter from her, Paul Newman. Not long after her defeat, Abzug was invited to cut the cake at the launch party for US magazine at Elaine’s. She leaned over the cake, knife in hand, to discover the frosted face of Paul Newman, the cover boy for the magazine’s inaugural issue, smiling up at her. “I’d like to circumsize him instead,” she cracked, carving right in.

  Conservatives rejoiced at Abzug’s departure from Washington. “The spectacle of a Congress without her has plunged her supporters into a grief rivaling the Maoists’,” cackled the editors of the National Review; “for at least two years, the Captor Nations will be short one representative in Congress.”

  By the end of ’76 most of Abzug’s former employees had moved on to saner places of employ. This was not saying much. The only oppressed minority that Abzug had no sympathy for was her staff. It wasn’t just the twenty-hour days; it was the emotional torture in the form of expletive-streaked abuse. The expletives changed, but the message stayed the same: “How could you be so stupid?” The tirades were made the more unbearable by the fact that they all believed so deeply in her. They were, to a man or woman, committed liberals, peace activists and graduates of the women’s movement. For all of the lash marks on their backs, they remained fanatically loyal to their boss. “To work for Bella, you had to either be a masochist or an ideologue,” says Doug Ireland, whom Abzug referred to as a “fat cocksucker” whenever she was in a foul mood.

  Now that everyone had settled comfortably into the living room of her brownstone, Abzug asked for candid responses: Could she be elected the next mayor of New York? Dora Friedman, Abzug’s administrative assistant, spoke first, and she spoke in an us-against-them language Abzug understood. “I don’t think you can do it, Bella,” she said. “They would never let you win. They would find some way to turn the electorate against you.” The rest of the group waited quietly for their chance to second Friedman’s sentiments.

  Abzug gritted her teeth and peered over her half rimmed glasses. “Are you quite finished?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Friedman answered.

  Abzug hoisted her roly-poly frame up out of her chair. “How dare you speak to me like that,” she thundered in a voice that could, as Norman Mailer once put it, “boil the fat off a taxi driver’s neck.” She ranted and raved and huffed and puffed. She opened a closet door, then slammed it shut. She knocked over a few chairs as she stormed into the kitchen, then knocked over a few more as she stormed back into the living room with a can of Pepsi.

  Finally, she sat back down, pulled the tab off her Pepsi, and asked if anyone else had anything to say. A cacophony of voices chimed in: “You should run, Bella … Yes, definitely run.”

  Her candidacy remained the worst-kept secret in New York for the better part of six months. As long as her announcement wasn’t official, she wasn’t subject to the equal-time law, meaning that she could chatter away on The Merv Griffin Show and the Sunday morning talk show circuit without having to share time with the rest of the candidates. There were also rumors that President Carter might have a job for her, possibly even chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission, and she didn’t want to queer that deal, however remote a possibility. (Mayor Beame, who was all too aware of Abzug’s popularity in the city, called on President Carter to encourage him to find a place for her, but Carter had already been warned that she was difficult to work with.)

  The groundswell of support was building, and Abzug helped it along with quotes like this: “Barbra [as in Streisand] is begging me to run” She even teased at her plans in a cameo on Saturday Night in an interview with Miss Emily Litella, the addled TV news editorialist played by Gilda Radner who confused Soviet Jewry with Soviet jewelry and busing children with busting them. “Nothing’s wrong with New York that a change in leadership can’t solve,” said Abzug. “So Stella,” Miss Emily replied, “does this mean that you’re going to throw your cat in the ring? I hope not because I can’t understand why politicians throw their cats in the ring. The poor cats can’t even put on gloves. Why throw them in the ring?”

  When she did finally enter the race at the beginning of June, Abzug did hurl her big black straw hat into the crowd gathered in front of her. “It just went straight down,” remembers Holzer. “I thought to myself, ‘This is a very bad omen.’”

  8.

  HAVING already gobbled up one New York journalistic institution, Rupert Murdoch was now hungry for another. His eyes alit on New York magazine.

  New York had gestated as a newspaper insert inside the Sunday edition of the Herald-Tribune in the mid-1960s, was born as a standalone publication in the spring of ’68, and came of age in the infamous era of white flight and urban blight. Not that you would have known that from reading the magazine. While the rest of the country wrote and rewrote the city’s obituary, New York stuffed its issues with mash notes, stories that celebrated the city’s outsize characters (from Roy Cohn to Frank Serpico) and embraced its consumer culture (from Gucci to Givenchy).

  Its founder/editor was Clay Felker, a tall, good-looking man with tiny feet, who dated a slender redhead, the best-selling author Gail Sheehy, and rented a well-appointed Fifth Avenue duplex with a massive statue of George Washington on horseback in the living room. Felker’s well-trained social compass—the product of his own small-town-boy aspirations to make it in Manhattan—tugged him inexorably toward the city’s ever-shifting power center. Yet the midwesterner was a perpetual outsider in the Big City. The paradox served him as an editor beautifully: He was both sophisticated and wide-eyed.

  New York magazine was an editorial triumph, one that spawned countless imitators in cities across America. As a business, though, it never quite found its footing. In the beginning, Felker had had no trouble wooing venture capitalists. None of them had any illusions about getting rich, but since most of them already were, that didn’t much matter. The magazine offered great cocktail party cachet, and the charismatic Felker was irresistible. “Everybody wanted to know Clay; everybody wanted Clay to like them,” says Robert Towbin, one enthusiastic early investor.

  New York’s cash flow problems started early and never diminished. A year after the magazine’s launch the company was already starved for money and offered its stock to the public at ten dollars a share. A ritual developed at the annual board meeting. The company’s chairman, Alan Patricof, would review Felker’s exorbitant expense account line by line, while he and Felker screamed at each other.

  Felker was determined not to let money concerns interfere with his plans to build an empire. In 1974 he approached his board with a proposal to buy The Village Voice. The directors balked, so Felker arranged for a merger that diluted his stake in the new company to 10 percent and boosted that of the Voice’s principal stockholder, Carter Burden, to 24 percent. Not tw
o years later Felker persuaded his board to bring out New West, a New York magazine for California. Circulation and advertising were soon outpacing expectations, but so were start-up costs. True to form, Felker was not exactly running a lean operation. Among other things, he leased a pair of Alfa-Romeos for two editors who had been flown in from New York to pitch in with the launch. He was also angling for a 25 percent raise to his $120,000 salary and some additional perks, including a house in the Hamptons.

  By the fall of ’76 the New York Magazine Company was hemorrhaging money. Relations between Felker and his board were strained. From the perspective of the directors, Felker’s recalcitrance had become exhausting, and the cachet of being associated with the magazine had diminished as he had grown less and less willing to humor his investors.

  For his part, Felker was increasingly convinced that the money-men were conspiring against him. He wasn’t entirely wrong. Patricof was certain that if spending continued at its current levels, the company would go broke the following year. He also knew that as long as Felker was in charge, they’d be lucky if spending remained at current levels. Patricof told Felker that something had to give. “Clay,” he warned, “find your own solution to the problem. If you don’t, we’ll have no choice but to find one ourselves.”

  Enter Rupert Murdoch. Felker and Murdoch had been introduced by Katharine Graham, the publisher of The Washington Post. When Murdoch subsequently moved to New York, Graham asked Felker to show him around town. They became fast friends, lunching in midtown, lounging poolside on summer weekends in the Hamptons, and, on occasion, discussing possible joint ventures. The lowbrow Murdoch and urbane Felker were drawn to different sides of New York—Murdoch to its grime, Felker to its glamour—but both had been seduced by the City of Ambition.

  In a cab after dinner in late November 1976, Felker confided in Murdoch that he was having trouble with his partners at New York and asked if Murdoch, a battle-scarred veteran of boardroom warfare, had any advice. “He [Felker] was not astute enough to recognize that what he was doing was like asking an alcoholic to sniff your drink,” wrote Michael Leapman, one of Murdoch’s British biographers. A few days later Felker filled in some of the details over lunch. Murdoch offered Felker a piece of unsolicited advice for future business dealings: Borrow whatever you need to own 51 percent of something. Scrimp and save and bust your hump, and buy the rest: “Then you don’t have to take any crap from anybody.”