“Billy was all upset about the picture in the paper,” Sapir said. “He kept talking about how Heather was going to see the picture and how much it would bother her. After a couple drinks he asked me if I could get a justice of the peace or someone for a wedding in New Orleans.
“And I said, ‘Yeah, I could do that.’ And he asked, ‘Could you set up all the licenses and get a hotel for a day?’ And I said, ‘Sure.’
“He didn’t say much else. Then he got up to go to the bathroom. It took him a little while but when he came back he said, ‘I just proposed to Heather.’”
Sapir was astonished. Billy then added that Heather wanted Sapir to call her.
“I called Heather and she said, ‘Eddie, is he serious?’” Sapir recalled. “And I said, ‘Well, Heather, you know he loves you and he asked me to set up a wedding in New Orleans. He wants me to get all the licenses, a hotel suite, and all of that, so, yes, he’s serious.’
“I went back to my seat and Billy said he wanted to get married that month. I started thinking of New Orleans hotels to call.”
But first Billy and his lawyer, the New Orleans judge, left the Blarney Stone to meet Jill across town for dinner.
The wedding was on November 30 at the Maison Dupuy Hotel in the French Quarter. The guest list was limited. Billy instructed the Sapirs and others not to say much about it.
Sapir, who rarely interfered in Billy’s personal life, felt relieved.
“Because I figured that it would be the end of Jill and the two-girlfriend situation,” Sapir said. “I thought Jill would go away. But obviously, Jill didn’t go away.”
Billy continued to see both women, although he hid the marriage from Jill and almost everyone else.
On January 11, the Yankees announced that Billy would be the Yankees manager for a third time. He had a long-term contract. In fact, he would remain in the Yankees’ employ for the rest of his life.
His son called him when he heard the news from New York.
“Dad, please, not again,” Billy Joe said. “Not the Yankees. Not again. Why?”
Answered Billy, “That’s what I am, pard. I’m a Yankee.”
39
THE 1983 MEDIA GUIDE published by the Yankees, an essential reference tool distributed to thousands of newspaper reporters, broadcasters, and other journalists in an age before the Internet, had a cartoonlike caricature of Billy as he pointed a finger and screamed face-to-face at an umpire. It was a strange thing for a team to be promoting, and it would prove to be prescient, although perhaps not in the winsome way the Yankees intended.
Billy, and his owner, would have problems with umpires all season. The 1983 media guide was notable for another reason. It included a detailed, pages-long biography of Billy with a glaring omission. The bio chronicled Billy’s playing and managerial careers and the four Manager of the Year awards he had won. While the other similar bios of players and coaches in the media guide mentioned the player’s or the coach’s marital status—and usually included a spouse’s name—in Billy’s 1983 bio there was no mention of Heather. It made no mention that Billy was married at all.
Billy’s wife was seen at his side from time to time in New York, although she remained primarily in Blackhawk. Jill, meanwhile, was spotted everywhere. Also omnipresent was Billy’s chauffeur, Tex Gernand, the imposing ex–New York City cop who almost looked like a larger version of Billy himself with a thin black mustache. Gernand also wore a lot of Western wear like his boss.
Gernand, a former officer with the 109th Precinct in Flushing, Queens, served as Billy’s unofficial bodyguard on many occasions, and he was very proud of the fact that Billy never got in a fight or was harmed in any way when he was on duty.
In 1983, Billy had a stately, long Town Car with the license plate YANKEE1 and he told Gernand to always park it next to Steinbrenner’s plain Oldsmobile in the VIP parking lot just outside Yankee Stadium.
“I want him to see that big car and the YANKEE1 license plate every time he comes out after a game,” Billy said to Gernand. “Let him know who the real top Yankee is.”
“What if George says something to me about the fact that we’re always right next to him?” Gernand asked.
“Say that you only take orders from me and then tell him to go fuck himself,” Billy said with a roaring laugh.
It was 1948 again in the Oakland Oaks parking lot, except instead of parking his ragtag car next to the veterans’ trophy cars he was trying to torment his multimillionaire owner with a luxurious Town Car and a license plate.
But Steinbrenner was, in fact, delighted that Billy had a driver. Like many in Billy’s sphere, he had long feared for Billy’s safety—and the safety of others—when Billy drove after he drank.
Gernand could soon be found throughout the eastern United States driving for Billy. A considerate, wise man behind the gruff exterior, he also began to feel like a guardian to his boss in more ways than one. Tex Gernand, for example, expressed his concern to Sapir about Billy’s two-woman lifestyle.
Gernand did not understand the relationship with Heather, whom he saw irregularly whenever she stayed at the Carlyle Hotel suite Billy was renting. Tex usually spent more time with Jill, and the whole situation vexed him.
“She seemed like a young girl, someone still growing up,” Gernand said of Heather. “I didn’t understand the whole setup.”
Tex wasn’t the only one to feel the need to say something.
“I said to Billy, ‘Look, you are a big-time public figure and it’s not going to end well if this gets out,’” Sapir said. “I suggested that if Jill was going to stick around that we had to give her a job and a title. We had started a Billy Martin public relations firm run out of my office in New Orleans. I suggested that we hire Jill as Billy’s official photographer. Then we have an explanation for her presence and all the travel.”
Jill described 1983 as a year of awakening for her.
“I had never lived on the East Coast and I had never seen so many things but Billy showed me the world,” she said. “Billy wanted everyone around him to be having a good time. And he wanted to share his world.
“He taught me to cook. I have the recipes to this day—Italian food, chicken Florentine, a lovely lamb he stewed all day. He had a temper and he could be very jealous, which was not always nice, but that usually passed very quickly. We were having a blast most of the time.”
The 1983 home season opened with a record 55,579 fans welcoming Billy back to the old Bronx ballpark, a crowd recruited in part by a thorough marketing campaign by the Yankees that included billboards and television commercials that featured a new team slogan, BILLY IS BACK.
By the third inning of the home opener, the crowd was howling as Billy got into a snit with an umpire at second base. It was not a good omen. The Yankees lost.
By early May, Billy had been suspended three games for kicking dirt on umpire Drew Coble. Steinbrenner was suspended for a week for his nonstop haranguing of the umpires in the newspapers.
The 1983 Yankees were not a powerhouse team, and they stumbled at the start of the season, losing sixteen of their first thirty games. George, who had vowed to reporters in spring training not to interfere in the managing of the team until at least the All-Star break, broke that promise in early May while the Yankees were in Texas.
Steinbrenner personally addressed the team, admonishing the players for their sub-.500 start. He also had a private, closed-door meeting with Billy and his coaches during which he ridiculed relief pitcher George Frazier, according to coaches who later spoke off the record to reporters about the meeting. For his part, Billy also went into the clubhouse afterward and told the players to ignore what George had said, eliciting a round of chuckles.
Billy’s old adversary, Henry Hecht of the New York Post, wrote about the players and coaches’ meeting, giving the details of both, including the derision directed at Frazier. The day Hecht’s story ran, reporters were in Billy’s office when Steinbrenner called. Billy was heard saying
that he hadn’t read the article.
Then he said, “Henry? OK, I’ll take care of it.”
The next day, about two hours before a game, Billy was in his office telling reporters that Hecht’s story was false on several accounts when he was informed that Hecht was in the clubhouse. Billy hurried out of his office.
“Hey, can I have your attention for a second,” he announced to the players. “We had a private meeting in Texas, a clubhouse meeting, and nothing leaves the clubhouse and I don’t think anything did. At least I haven’t read anything written that was accurate. But we have a writer right here who has me knocking Frazier, George knocking Frazier, and me knocking George. And he wasn’t even in Texas.”
Billy continued, pointing at Hecht, who was about ten feet away: “I don’t ever say don’t talk to the writers, but don’t talk to Henry Hecht—that’s him, right there. If you do talk to him, you’re making a mistake. He doesn’t care if he hurts you or gets you fired. He’s using you. He is the worst fucking scrounge we’ve ever had around this club.”
In a stunned and silent clubhouse, Hecht looked at Billy and said, “You can imagine what I think of you.”
“I’ve read what you think of me,” Billy said.
“You’re paranoid,” Hecht added.
“I’m not paranoid,” Billy said. “I don’t have to be paranoid to see that you’re a little prick.”
Billy went into his office, telling Hecht that he wouldn’t deny him his ability to make a living before adding, “But stay away from me or I’ll dump you in the whirlpool.”
When Billy was asked afterward if Steinbrenner put him up to his rant against Hecht, Billy said, “George called me and told me to handle the article.”
There was plenty of coverage of Billy’s diatribe in the New York papers. Then it died out quickly, although not in the mind of Hecht.
“It was just another sign of how disturbed and unbalanced he had become,” Hecht said many years later.
Still, the brouhaha went away, although some players were aghast at what they had witnessed. It was just the first of many bizarre moments during 1983.
On the field, the Yankees had their own problems. They were a winning team that would stay in the AL East race until mid-September, but Steinbrenner was still experimenting with the concept of building a team around speed and hitters who slashed the ball into the outfield gaps—hitters like Ken Griffey, center fielder Jerry Mumphrey, and the new shortstop, Roy Smalley. There was also a new catcher, Butch Wynegar, whom Billy terrorized for his handling of an uneven pitching staff.
The team had All-Stars in Randolph; the superb Dave Winfield, who loved playing for Billy; and the designated hitter, Don Baylor. Guidry would win 21 games and Righetti contributed 14 victories as did an underrated lefty, Shane Rawley. But the rest of the rotation was largely ineffective.
The team’s play was erratic and the players were aging. Still, the Yankees were neck-and-neck with the Orioles, Tigers, and Toronto Blue Jays for the division lead throughout most of the summer.
But hours before a June home game there was another firestorm, and it began with a researcher for the New York Times named Deborah Henschel, who was in the Yankees’ clubhouse handing out ballots to the players for a poll about the All-Star Game. All the facts of the scene that played out next are unclear, although it is indisputable that Billy ended up loudly escorting Henschel from the clubhouse. He later said he did not know she was a representative of the New York Times.
Art Fowler had also been fired that day, which did not improve Billy’s mood.
Billy said he thought Henschel was dressed provocatively—something about a skirt with a slit in it—and he thought she was a girlfriend of a player. Henschel said Billy angrily cursed at her.
Eventually, the Yankees made sure Henschel could complete her assignment in the visitors’ locker room.
The episode made the newspapers and the American League launched an investigation, interviewing Henschel and Yankees employees, all of whom said they had not seen anything. The investigation absolved Billy of wrongdoing.
The Yankees were only three games back in the AL East standings, but the controversies—none that had anything to do with baseball—kept piling up. On a trip to Milwaukee County Stadium, the Yankees were playing a game on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Billy was sitting on a towel on a concrete wall at the edge of the dugout. Reporters could not help but notice a striking, fetching blonde in short shorts lounging in the front-row box next to where Billy sat.
Throughout the game, Billy appeared to be conversing with the blonde, who had kicked off her sandals and placed her long, tanned legs on a railing by the field’s boundary. It was Jill. At some point, the press box watched as Jill started passing handwritten notes to Billy by writing them on a small piece of paper and then placing them between her toes. In the dugout, Billy was plucking the notes from Jill’s toes.
At first, the reporters decided not to write about the scene. But as often happened, press box pacts dissolved in the heat of a competitive newspaper environment. Bill Madden of the New York Daily News wrote about the young woman passing notes to Billy.
The next day in the visitors’ clubhouse, Billy was told what Madden wrote.
“He did what?” Billy yelped. “How the hell could he do that? Doesn’t he know I’m married! I’m married!”
Players were often seen with paramours or girlfriends on the road, known as “imports”—but that was never written about. A nighttime rendezvous away from the ballpark didn’t seem like anyone’s business. Now some woman was passing the Yankees manager notes with her toes next to the dugout in broad daylight. It became big news.
Steinbrenner was not pleased, although he didn’t know quite what to do. He flew to Cleveland to meet the team on their next stop. So did Sapir. The three had lunch, and Billy and George yelled at each other throughout much of the meal.
When the lunch ended, George actually said he felt better.
“At least we got some things off our chest,” George said. And that was the end of it. The woman in the short shorts had become a mirage.
Sapir, in fact, issued a memorable statement. As Madden and the Newark Star-Ledger’s venerable reporter Moss Klein wrote in their 1990 book, Damned Yankees, Sapir announced to gathered reporters in the team hotel, “Reports of the girl are unfounded.”
It was unclear if Heather, still in the Bay Area, knew of the Milwaukee situation. If only that had been the end of the madness during the 1983 season. In some ways, it was just beginning.
On July 24, the Yankees, who were just 1.5 games out of first place, played the Kansas City Royals. They took a 4–3 lead into the ninth inning when Gossage came into the game to face George Brett with two outs and a runner at first base.
Brett lashed a long home run into the right-field seats for a 5–4 Royals lead. Billy, with Nettles’s help, had noticed in a game three weeks earlier that Brett had pine tar, the sticky substance batters use to improve their grip on a bat, far up the barrel of the bat.
The rule at the time was that the pine tar could not extend more than eighteen inches past the knob of the bat. It was a silly rule—pine tar had no impact on the flight of a batted ball—but it was in the rule book because the pine tar stained the baseball—and possibly gave pitchers something to use for an illegal pitch afterward. Obscure as it was, the rule was still called from time to time. It was called on the Yankees’ Thurman Munson in 1979, which had brought a screaming-mad Billy from the dugout. It might be a ticky-tacky rule, but it had been enforced before.
Billy had waited to say anything about Brett’s bat, delaying a protest until Brett produced a big hit. With Brett celebrating his go-ahead home run in the visitors’ dugout, the time was right. Billy calmly strode out to home plate umpire Tim McClelland to question the legality of Brett’s bat.
“The pine tar is beyond the eighteen-inch mark,” Billy said.
McClelland took the bat from the Kansas City batboy who was still holding it. T
he umpire knew that the front part of home plate was eighteen inches in width.
Waiting in the dugout, Brett was pacing, vowing revenge if Billy’s protest nullified the home run.
“If they call me out, you’re going to see four dead umpires,” Brett said.
McClelland measured the bat against home plate and saw that the pine tar extended beyond eighteen inches. He pointed at Brett in the dugout and held up his fist, making the signal for an out. The bat was illegal under rule 1.10 (c), and that made Brett out under rule 6.06. The game was over. The Yankees were declared 4–3 winners.
Billy smiled and walked back to the dugout with his hands in his back pockets, another victory stolen from the jaws of defeat.
In one of the most-replayed video scenes in baseball history, Brett stormed from the dugout in a crazed fury trying to get at McClelland. Another umpire grabbed Brett by the neck. Various players and the Kansas City manager, Dick Howser, were being ejected.
The league immediately said it would review the matter at a later date. A precious few games in the history of American sports have been replayed after the game officials have made a determination of a rule and left the playing field—even when it was later established that the officials were wrong—but in this case, American League president Lee MacPhail decided to replay the end of the game in August. MacPhail, fed up with the constant berating of his umpires by Billy and Steinbrenner, conceded that the umpires had executed the pine tar ruling justly. But in MacPhail’s judgment, the umpire’s decision was “not in the spirit of the rule.”
MacPhail ordered the game replayed from the moment after Brett’s homer.
Eleven days after what forevermore became known as “the Pine Tar Game,” the Yankees were playing in Toronto’s aging Exhibition Stadium, which was perched at the edge of Lake Ontario. Because of its proximity to the lake and because fans leave behind lots of discarded food scraps, the stadium was routinely overrun with large white seagulls. They would stand on the field and occasionally disrupt play or get hit by a ground ball in the outfield.
Billy Martin Page 48
