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

by Jonathan Mahler

  The next morning, Labor Day, Cuomo walked into Ratner’s, a kosher dairy restaurant on the Lower East Side, to find Biaggi sitting hunched over a plate of scrambled eggs and onions. “Do I have time for breakfast?” Cuomo asked one of his handlers. He didn’t. Cuomo grabbed half a toasted bagel to go and set off with his newest supporter to tape a fresh campaign commercial.

  The next day, forty-eight hours before the primary, the two Marios walked the streets of Brooklyn together. Asked about Cuomo’s position on the death penalty, Biaggi answered, “If he wins, I think I can persuade him.”

  51.

  BACK in Manhattan, Koch was busy campaigning with his own sidekick, one enlisted to protect a very different soft spot. Bess Myerson, who was out of town for much of August, had been summoned back to New York for the final push. During the waning days of the campaign the two were inseparable.

  The press gamely played along. When a Post lensman snapped them hand in hand at a beach club in Canarsie on September 6, the photo graced the front page. The SoHo Weekly News’s Sherryl Connelly caught up with the candidate and his leading lady at the San Gennaro Festival. “Both have refused to discuss marriage publicly, but as they draw nearer to the seat of power it has become important to many people to determine just how close is very close,” she wrote. The story continued: “Very close.” And continued: “As they meet on the streets of Little Italy at the end of a long day, in the midst of a milling crowd lighted by a neon glow, their faces come alive. Forming a tight unit of two that the push of people can’t break into, they share the day’s anecdotes.”

  Earlier in the summer, it was Myerson whom the voters had recognized. By the end of August people were asking Koch, suggestively: “Who’s that with you, Ed?”

  But Myerson provided Koch with much more than an answer to those inclined to wonder about his sexual preference. After all, she wasn’t just the first Jewish Miss America; she was New York’s first Miss America, a dark-haired daughter of the Bronx who had trained as a concert pianist and earned a degree from Hunter College before winning her title in 1945, the year the concentration camps were liberated. New York could not have been more proud of her, even if the rest of the country had its doubts. (On her postpageant tour Myerson tried to visit a World War II veteran whose mother barred the door. “Because of the damned Jews,” she said, “my boy was maimed.”)

  With the exception of Bella Abzug, Myerson was the city’s most public woman, a former commissioner of consumer affairs who might well have been elected to the Senate in 1974 had her bid not been derailed by an eighteen-month bout with ovarian cancer. Like New York itself, Myerson was a survivor, not just of the cancer but of a demeaning if well-compensated career as a TV game show host, one marriage to an abusive alcoholic, and another to a rich, high-profile attorney whom she wedded and divorced twice. By 1977 Myerson’s tiara had lost its luster, but she was still New York’s queen. And the balding, pear-shaped man by her side was her unlikely king.

  52.

  This muck heaves and palpitates. It is multidirectional and has a mayor.

  DONALD BARTHELME, CITY LIFE

  THE months of three-digit temperatures, of air so humid it might as well have been water, were finally over. On Thursday, September 8, a mild, partly cloudy day, a record number of New York City Democrats turned out to nominate their candidate or at least narrow the field to two.

  As night approached, the candidates made their way to their respective locations to await the returns. Abzug barreled confidently into the Roosevelt Hotel, her brown suede hat flopping, to the strains of the theme song from “Rocky.” A few hours later, when her fourth-place finish was all but confirmed, the band struck up a more somber tune, “Eleanor Rigby.” Abzug conceded at a little after midnight.

  Abe Beame, stubborn as usual, waited much longer. Not since 1917 had a New York City mayor duly elected to a four-year term been rejected by his own party. For hours Beame sat, his face creased with fatigue, watching the returns on the twentieth floor of the Americana Hotel before finally coming down to admit defeat at a little before 2 a.m. Now, in the same hotel where New York had gained a superstar less than a year earlier, it was about to lose a mayor.

  In a sense, it was losing more than that. “I gave this city every ounce of my strength and my fullest devotion during its most trying years of crisis,” Beame told his dwindling band of supporters. “I’ve not let this city down.” Moments later the usually stoic mayor began to cry. His wife, Mary, hugged him, allowing Beame to collect himself, and he pressed on. As he did, New York’s diminutive leader seemed almost to grow. He was no longer an easy object of derision, a pint-size emblem of the city’s failures, but rather a dignified civil servant, the embodiment of a vanishing New York, a New York in which the sons of socialists overcame poverty and then quietly devoted themselves to making the city a better place to live, where the Democratic Party machine (however corrupt) and the labor bosses (however power-hungry) always took care of their needy constituents.

  Meanwhile, at Charley O’s, a nondescript saloon in the theater district, the crowd was chanting “First Lady Bess.” Ed Koch handed a bouquet of red roses to Myerson—“the most important person of the campaign”—and celebrated his narrow first-place victory.

  Across the river at a catering hall in the eastern reaches of Queens, second-place finisher Mario Cuomo squinted into the harsh glare of the TV lights and looked ahead to the September 19 runoff. Cuomo had recovered his underdog status but Koch’s margin of victory had been less than one percent. A senior member of his campaign staff, Richard Starkey, felt encouraged. “Mario has nice things to say about all of his opponents save Koch,” Starkey wrote later that night in his diary. “He wants to put an end to the charge that he isn’t substantive enough. He wants to debate ‘Eddie’ every day for the next eleven days. He talks with a zest for combat that is familiar. Although he is tired he doesn’t let himself become aggressive or arrogant, just self-assured.”

  The following morning the feminist Gloria Steinem told viewers of the Stanley Siegel Show that the election results confirmed that the once liberal city had lurched to the right. That was one way of looking at it. Another was that in eliminating Beame and Abzug and choosing Koch and Cuomo, the city’s voters had narrowed the field to the two candidates least encumbered by the past.

  53.

  ED Koch and Mario Cuomo had landed in first and second place in the September 8 primary, but they had managed to capture just 39 percent of the votes between them. The remaining 61 percent was now up for grabs, setting off a furious ten-day scramble for support that quickly devolved into an orgy of deal making, backstabbing, and score settling.

  The runoff began predictably enough, with each candidate sounding familiar campaign themes. The day after the primary Cuomo spoke of the need to “harmonize” New York’s “magnificient mosaic” and warned of Koch’s potential to divide. Koch told the Times that the last thing the city needed was a “pacifier” like Cuomo.

  On September 10 the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association held its annual convention upstate. The PBA’s president, Samuel DeMilia, invited both Democratic candidates to speak. Koch, who’d been hammering away at the police union all summer, declined, reminding voters instead that he wasn’t afraid to take on DeMilia—“the same Sam DeMilia who asked police officers not to volunteer to work on the Son of Sam case on their own time.”

  Cuomo barely made it there himself. His helicopter pilot got lost in the Catskills and wound up landing on the fairway of a golf course. A man on the second tee managed to direct them to the convention center, where the cops stood and whistled for Cuomo when he told them the city wouldn’t be such a mess if the politicians had only done their jobs as well as the cops. With the support of the police union assured, or so he thought, Cuomo hustled back to the city for a late-night meeting in Riverdale with Herman Badillo.

  In such a compressed race, winning over large blocs of voters was going to be critical, and Badillo had a large bloc t
o deliver. Since 1960, the year he created a new Democratic club in East Harlem to help presidential hopeful John F. Kennedy register blacks and Latinos, Badillo, a magna cum laude graduate of City College, had evolved into one of New York’s most forceful and persistent minority advocates and, owing to the recent explosion of the city’s Puerto Rican population, one of its most powerful. As that community’s premier spokesman, Badillo now held sway over roughly 10 percent of the electorate.

  Moreover, on the day after the primary Badillo formed an informal coalition with two other losers, Bella Abzug and Percy Sutton. They planned to meet with the two candidates individually and then collectively endorse the one most committed to helping the city’s minorities. Taken together, Badillo, Abzug, and Sutton had won 42 percent of the primary vote, more than Koch and Cuomo combined. Given Abzug’s disdain for Koch, this boded well for Cuomo.

  The Sunday morning after his meeting with Badillo, Cuomo brought his family to the Church of the Master, a black Presbyterian parish in Harlem. He at first declined to speak, then agreed to take to the pulpit and improvised his best address of the campaign. After sketching the history of the Catholic Church’s awakening to the moral obligation to participate in the political process, Cuomo transitioned into the city’s problems. If he’d had time to prepare, he might have thought better of merging matters of church and state. As it happened, the theological preamble gave his words a fresh urgency, especially among a congregation whose faith had been so sorely tested by rampant crime and poverty. Arriving, inevitably, at the “question,” Cuomo said that if the election was to be won or lost over the death penalty, “then we have to win,”—and now the congregation was whispering amen, amen—“because we cannot say to the whole country, to the whole world … that we are a people who have come to believe that the only solution to our problem is death.”

  In two days Cuomo had won over a convention hall full of New York City cops and a church full of black Presbyterians. The comparisons to Kennedy were beginning to look prophetic. That was when Cuomo’s troubles began.

  Badillo had apparently not been satisfied by their meeting. “I couldn’t get a straight answer from him … He kept giving me the typical Cuomo philosophical discourse,” Badillo remembers. In exchange for his endorsement, Badillo wanted to control the hiring for the top job in New York’s public housing program, a critical appointment for the city’s minorities. More broadly, he wanted to know what Cuomo would do for the Hispanic community. “I said, ‘Look, I’m not going to dish out jobs,’” Cuomo recalls.

  Badillo brought the same question to Koch, who promised to appoint Hispanics at every level of the city government and, as an added incentive, offered to name Badillo cochairman of his campaign. Badillo broke with his short-lived coalition and announced that he was now supporting, and working for, Ed Koch.

  Losing Badillo was a blow to Cuomo, but it had at least given Sutton another reason to back him. Not only had Koch lined up against the black community in the Forest Hills housing dispute a few years earlier, but during the primary Sutton had accused Koch of using “racial code words” like “poverty pimps” in his attacks on the city’s corruption-rife antipoverty programs. Now that he’d been betrayed by Koch’s new campaign cochairman—“Oh, Herman!” a disappointed Sutton had gasped upon hearing the news—he was sure to swing behind Cuomo. And when he did, Sutton would be bringing much more than his own weight to bear. At a secret postprimary meeting in Congressman Charles Rangel’s Harlem office, the city’s most prominent black leaders had empowered him to speak on behalf of the entire community.

  Cuomo was about to capture Sutton’s endorsement when a power struggle in New York City black politics rudely intervened. Led by Vander Beatty, a flashy state senator from Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn (who was later sent to jail for embezzling state funds from a local rehabilitation program), several of the black political and community leaders who’d been present at the meeting in Rangel’s office gathered on the steps of City Hall on the morning of September 13 to preempt Sutton and endorse Cuomo on their own. Twice betrayed, Sutton was now fuming: at the Brooklyn leaders for upstaging him and at Cuomo for not informing him that they were going to do so. Sutton decided to remain neutral in the runoff.

  With the black and minority coalitions ruptured, Koch began maneuvering for more African-American endorsements. On the afternoon of September 13, he invited Representative Rangel and twenty other black leaders to a private meeting in David Garth’s office. Koch, as conciliatory in private as he was confrontational in public, told them he didn’t realize he’d been using racial code words and that he’d be happy to change his rhetoric. He talked about his involvement in the civil rights struggle, registering black voters in Mississippi and marching with the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., in Alabama. “I was very eloquent,” Koch observed of the meeting in his 1984 memoir Mayor. More to the point, he promised to bring more minorities into his administration than the previous three mayors combined. (Koch ultimately made good on that pledge, though not until midway through his second term.)

  Sensing the shifting tides, several other local black leaders quickly moved to try to prevent Koch from gaining momentum. One state senator, Major Owens, wrote an open letter to the city’s black leaders in which he called Koch a “race-baiter” who would scapegoat minorities, dismantle community-based antipoverty programs, and polarize the city. “Our only option is the total commitment of the Black leadership and electorate of this city to the candidacy of Mario Cuomo,” Owens said. By now, however, many of the city’s most powerful black politicians, Rangel and David Dinkins among them, were already lining up behind Koch.

  Cuomo was growing frustrated. When the New York Post’s Joyce Purnick called him while he was preparing for the first debate of the runoff on the night of September 14, he told her he was too busy to talk, then blew off some self-righteous steam, remarking that he didn’t want to win badly enough to engage in influence peddling. “This illusion that you can have one morality on the way there and another morality when you get there is not only the ultimate in hypocrisy, it is unreal,” he said. “It is. It’s nonsense … I don’t work that way. If I do what I think is wrong, I am not going to be able to lead.”

  Cuomo’s indignation carried over into that night’s Channel 13 debate. He promptly went on the offensive, assailing Manhattan for turning its back on the outer boroughs and chiding Koch for supporting the death penalty. “I went into that debate feisty and as near to angry as I ever get, and it showed,” Cuomo remembers. “I was impolite. I was extremely tough on Koch. I did an awful job.”

  Koch, following his media manager’s advice, studiously avoided engaging his opponent. “Garth said, ‘Ignore him, don’t listen to him, don’t talk to him, talk to the camera. He’s a distraction,’” Koch recalls. “The danger was that there’s no question that Cuomo is a sensational debater. I’m not sure he always tells the truth, but whether he does or he doesn’t, he makes a wonderful impression, so if you get sucked into debating with him you’re going to lose.”

  Later that night Cuomo campaign aide Richard Starkey scribbled a dejected entry into his diary: “The debate is a major disappointment because Mario is reduced to a sniping role. He’s testy instead of smooth and unruffled. He harps too much on the death penalty issue … I had hoped for a decisive drubbing of Koch. This is at best a standoff, at worst a defeat for my man Mario.”

  54.

  THE same night the Yankees and Red Sox were locked in their own standoff in the second of three high-stakes games at the stadium.

  Only ten days earlier the Yanks had opened their lead on the Sox to four and a half. With a little less than a month to go in the regular season, it was almost time to start the pennant countdown. Then the Yankees stumbled. Not badly—they dropped a twin bill to Cleveland and two of four to the cellar-dwelling Blue Jays—but badly enough to enable the streaking Sox, who had won ten of their last eleven, to pull within one and a half games before boarding their charter pla
ne for New York.

  The two teams had not met since June, when they split six games. The upcoming showdown was to draw 164,852 fans to the Bronx, baseball’s biggest three-day crowd in almost twenty years. In Boston, hope bloomed. The Globe slapped its September 13 series curtain-raiser above the fold on page one: “It is like the conclusion of some 1000-page novel, some epic paperback potboiler that has been carried around for an entire summer … Was there ever any doubt where the plot lines were leading?”

  Guidry opened for the Yanks, mowing down the first three Sox hitters on ten pitches. In the top half of the second, a walk and a wild pitch helped Boston parlay two hits into two runs. It was the last time they’d get a runner past first. For their part, the Yanks got on the board with one in the fourth, then pulled ahead 4–2 in the fifth. With Guidry in rhythm, the Sox went nowhere. He finished the game himself, following Martin’s instruction to stick with his fastball in the ninth so as not to risk hanging a slider.

  Then came the standoff. For eight complete innings on a cool mid-September night, the two teams swapped zeros. Yet it was not exactly a pitcher’s duel. The Yanks were certainly getting their rips. Red Sox third baseman Butch Hobson collared one hot smash after the next, and with two on and two out in the home half of the third, Munson crushed a line drive to left that seemed destined for extra bases. The thirty-eight-year-old Carl Yastrzemski took off on a dead sprint after the ball and launched into a full-extension dive to spear it inches above the grass.

  Figueroa was going for the Yanks, and the Sox were hammering him. Through the first four, Boston had put men on base every inning. In the fifth, with the bases loaded and nobody out, it looked as if the dam were about to burst when Fred Lynn hit a hard hopper back to the mound to start a 1-2-3 double play. The top half of every inning saw at least one towering fly ball pulled down in the meadows of Yankee Stadium’s endless outfield. In center, Mickey Rivers, who’d been hit square in the back by Reggie Cleveland’s first pitch of the night, reeled in three 410-plus drives. (“Rivers won’t be able to play tomorrow,” Yastrzemski said after the game, “because he has to go in for an oil change.”)