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

by Jonathan Mahler

  Backer told his wife that he hadn’t bargained for a career woman, and the two decided to divorce. That was just as well for Schiff, who was by now ready to move on to Thackrey. They were married in the office and after a one-night honeymoon moved into adjoining offices as coeditors and copublishers. Schiff traded in her dresses for slacks. They were more comfortable to work in, even if they hid what one of her numerous admirers had described as “the finest gams in New York.”

  During the forties the Post, now a tabloid, came into its own. Schiff and Thackrey called for bigger, snappier headlines and photos, more New York news, better columnists, flashier writing, a foreign bureau, and a Saturday magazine. “I’m fortunate in having average tastes—neither highbrow nor lowbrow—and although I’m interested in serious reading, I love gossip, scandal and human interest,” Schiff told Potter.

  The new Post was finally tilting toward its owner’s interests. Politically it was staunchly liberal, a full-throated champion of FDR, who had, in fact, owned a piece of the paper while it hemorrhaged money in the twenties. (President Roosevelt was also very close to Schiff, who was a frequent guest at Hyde Park. There were even rumors that the two had been romantically linked.) But it was not liberal enough for Thackrey, who wanted to endorse Henry Wallace, a Stalin sympathizer, for president in 1948. Schiff would have none of it, and the copublishers wrote competing endorsements, he for Wallace, she for Thomas Dewey. By now they had diverged on more than just politics. The following year Thackrey quit the Post and the marriage.

  His successor—at the paper anyway—was James Wechsler, the Post’s Washington bureau chief and one of the giants of twentieth-century American journalism. In his first edition as editor of the Post, Wechsler, a tiny pipe smoker who wore bow ties and suspenders, laid out his vision for the paper in an editorial headlined THE THINGS WE BELIEVE: “It has often seemed as if liberal journalism must be dull journalism on the theory that any interest in the variety of human experience is somewhat irreverent or irresponsible. We don’t accept this grim view. A newspaper … is the record of how people lived, exulted and suffered in every phase of their existence. We know that all of you will not agree with us all of the time, but we vow that you will never be bored.”

  Wechsler kept his word. His specialty was crusade reporting, and no threat to democracy, no matter how well insulated, was safe. The paper took aim at the great Robert Moses, uncovering the human cost of his “slum clearance,” and at J. Edgar Hoover, who subsequently ordered Wechsler’s hotel room bugged and labeled him a “little rat.” The Post published a twenty-four-part investigative series on syndicated columnist Walter Winchell, revealing his “frightening power to bully and browbeat” (Wechsler’s words), and was predictably answered by bullying and browbeating. Winchell devoted countless column inches to demonizing Wechsler, at one point reporting that the editor and his wife had stayed home on their anniversary rather than brave the public shaming that would have greeted them at any New York City restaurant.

  Most explosive of all was the Post’s seventeen-part expose of the foremost demagogue of his day, Senator Joseph McCarthy. Headlined SMEAR, INC.: JOE MCCARTHY’S ONE-MAN MOB, it was the first in-depth look at “the hoax of the century,” as the series described him. “America had known and survived other demagogues,” Wechsler wrote in his 1953 memoir, The Age of Suspicion. “McCarthy’s advantage was the peculiar depth and intensity of the crisis he was exploiting; the atomic bomb gave a new dimension to our fears.”

  The paper came under heavy fire in the wake of the series. Much of it was directed specifically at Wechsler, who had been a member of the Young Communist League at Columbia University in the thirties. Since leaving the party at age twenty-two, Wechsler had become one of America’s most militant anti-Communists, but that was of little concern to McCarthy, who preferred to believe that one couldn’t be both anti-Communist and anti-McCarthy. So the senator from Wisconsin hauled Wechsler before his tribunal, where he proceeded to rehearse the facts of the editor’s brief Communist past and added to it all sorts of farfetched fictions, including the preposterous suggestion that Wechsler was still a closet Commie.

  The competing papers lapped it up: POST EDITOR ADMITS HE WAS YOUNG RED; WECHSLER TIES BARED, blared a 1952 page one headline in the Journal-American. Unintimidated, Schiff stood by Wechsler, and her paper continued to gather steam.

  By the middle of the 1950s the New York newspaper market was crowded, and the Post was by no means the city’s biggest or its best, but it was profitable. It had carved out an intensely devoted constituency, in part because its sports section was the best in town. (Ernest Hemingway had the Post sent to him in Cuba so he wouldn’t miss the offerings of its emotional star columnist, Jimmy Cannon.) In this arena anyway, the afternoon press time worked to the Post’s advantage. At the end of the workday, streams of men in fedoras would pick up a copy for a nickel en route to the subway to catch up on the afternoon baseball scores.

  The Post shared the liberal politics of the Times and was every bit as literate, but it had a much streetier feel than the stodgy paper of record. “She [the post] is the good indignant mama of New York City as The New York Times is its good gray papa,” Jerry Tallmer wrote in a valentine to the Post in Dissent magazine in 1961. “Papa goes down to the firm and makes the money while mama keeps things hopping.” A. J. Liebling opted for a different metaphor that same year, calling the Post “warm, shrewd, pretentious and insecure, like a first-generation Phi Beta Kappa student at Hunter College.”

  The Daily News catered to blue-collar Catholics, a traditionally conservative lot, while the prounion, pro-civil rights Post (not coincidentally, Cannon was Jackie Robinson’s biggest booster) was the newspaper of New York’s blue-collar Jews. It was also the paper of Murray Kempton, whose columns seemed to embody best the paper’s ethos, its commitment to ennobling the struggles of the working class, while keeping a keen eye on the rich and powerful—comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, as the saw went. It was as well the paper of gentleman gossip columnist “Midnight” Earl Wilson-“nobody ever feared me,” Wilson once boasted—who chronicled the city’s nightlife six days a week in “It Happened Last Night.”

  Schiff decided to separate the Post’s editorial and news operations in 1962 and booted Wechsler upstairs to run the opinion pages. The paper’s circulation was slipping, and people had been telling her that Wechsler’s cause journalism was muscling out of the news hole too many sexy tabloid stories of crime and corruption.

  The new editor was Paul Sann, a wiry, Runyonesque newspaperman who wore closely cropped hair and cowboy boots and was free of ideological encumbrances. Sann inherently understood something that Wechsler, in his crusader’s zeal, had a tendency to forget: that the word tabloid didn’t simply refer to the physical format of a newspaper; it spoke to a whole approach to fashioning a narrative. Tabloids were passionate, dramatic, melodramatic. Even when big issues were at stake, tab stories had to be driven, and unabashedly, by larger-than-life characters and defining details. With Sann making sure that the rapists and crumb-bums got the same play as the pols and the eggheads, the paper hit high stride. “Wechsler gave the paper its liberal political soul; but Sann made it a tough ballsy tabloid,” wrote Pete Hamill, a Sann protege, in his memoir A Drinking Life.

  In December 1962 a citywide strike upended the New York newspaper world. Four major dailies died in its wake, and the Post would have keeled over too if Schiff hadn’t broken ranks with her fellow publishers and negotiated her own settlement with the unions. (Murdoch pulled exactly the same stunt in the summer of ’78.) In 1967, when the Post’s last afternoon competitor folded, the paper’s circulation jumped from four to seven hundred thousand.

  Yet even without competition, the Post was soon faltering as well. By the middle of the seventies the very notion of an afternoon newspaper seemed antiquated, particularly now that Vietnam and Watergate, which provided daytime copy that seemed too urgent to wait until the following morning to rea
d, were passing into history. Between the two of them, the Times and the News had a lock on the city’s advertising lineage. The Post’s brain trust, Wechsler and Sann, were aging; the paper’s readers, New York’s working-class liberals, were migrating to the suburbs in droves.

  The Post grew dowdy in its dotage. Schiff’s cheapness was partly to blame. Among her more memorable cost-cutting measures was the mandate that reporters obtain prior approval before placing overseas phone calls. The news hole, already shrinking as advertisements disappeared, was being overtaken by soft features and chalky profiles like “The Daily Close-Up.” Investigative reporting was all but out: too expensive. The paper had thirty columnists, most of whom weren’t exclusive to the Post and were instead bought on the cheap from a syndicate. Front-page news stories were picked up from the wires. One talented young writer after another left to seek his or her fortunes, or at least a living wage, elsewhere.

  Earl Wilson was still dutifully filing “It Happened Last Night,” but by the middle of the seventies the column had come to seem quaint, anachronistic. The rest of the media were busy discovering the new celebrity culture: Time Inc. launched People, Andy Warhol launched Interview, the Daily News hired people spotter Liz Smith. But the Post was still clinging to Midnight Earl and his jocular chitchat about the Great White Way.

  Schiff remained a strong presence at the paper. (Her arrival at the Post’s offices was always preceded by her white-gloved chauffeur, Everett, carrying her loyal Yorkshire, Suzy Q.) She was still more than happy to impose her political will on her reporters and editors, demanding, for instance, a stem-to-stern rewrite of a profile of William F. Buckley, Jr., that she deemed too flattering. There was no doubt about it, however: The Post was adrift. “In the last days of Dolly the paper was really horrific,” remembers longtime City Hall reporter George Artz. “When my stories on the Citizens Budget Committee became front-page news, I knew we were in trouble.”

  It’s hard not to read something else into the paper’s aimlessness. The trauma of the Lindsay years had eroded the populace’s faith in New York’s civic culture, which the Post had so assiduously nurtured with its expansive, old-fashioned liberalism. By the mid-seventies New York’s predominantly liberal middle class was becoming an increasingly conservative lot. Somewhere along the way the Post had lost its raison d’être, and Rupert Murdoch, who like any self-respecting publishing tycoon yearned to sink roots in New York, had apparently found his.

  Murdoch first met the Post’s silver-haired doyenne in the summer of 1974, at the East Hampton beach house of New York magazine’s celebrated editor, Clay Felker. Murdoch could be charming. Even in her seventies, Schiff, who’d been married and divorced four times and still smoked Kools through a white cigarette holder, was not immune to charm, particularly when her seducer’s sweet nothings included attacks on The New York Times.

  Not long after, Murdoch asked Schiff if the Post was for sale. It wasn’t the first time she’d been approached. Hearst and Newhouse, among numerous others, had made overtures in the past, though no one had offered to do much more than assume the paper’s mounting debt. She hadn’t been ready then, and she wasn’t ready now, though she was closer than perhaps even she knew.

  The Post logged a substantial loss in ‘75 and was en route to an even bigger deficit in ’76. Schiff had no other businesses to help absorb the damage. An imminent change in the estate tax law was likely to make it prohibitively expensive for her to pass the paper along to her heirs. Yet another strike by the print unions was in the offing.

  In the fall of ’76 Schiff invited Murdoch to lunch in her office suite on the sixth floor of the Post’s shabby downtown digs. The two publishers sat at her luncheon table and ate roast beef sandwiches on rye bread—Schiff served corned beef to Jews, tuna to Catholics, and roast beef to Protestants—beneath a life-size papier-mâché statue of Alexander Hamilton. “I sensed that she was very tired,” Murdoch later reflected. Secret negotiations began, and within three months they had settled on a thirty-one-million-dollar price tag.

  Murdoch went off to a private dining room upstairs at “21” to celebrate with twenty of his most trusted colleagues. The corks were still popping come midnight. The group eventually stumbled downstairs and found Governor Carey and Tip O’Neill, then in his final weeks as Speaker of the House, at the bar. Murdoch and his crew joined them for a drink. James Brady, the editor of the National Star, suggested that they finish the night at Elaine’s, where the media elite always finished its nights.

  As was the custom, a few stretch limos were grazing in front of “21,” hoping for some freelance fares. The Star’s ace reporter, Steve Dunleavy, suggested that they travel uptown in style. Murdoch shook his head; taxis would be cheaper.

  “But, Boss,” pleaded Dunleavy, “you just spent thirty million dollars on the Post. For once, let it be limos!” And it was.

  The restaurant was closing, but its proprietor, Elaine Kaufman, was there to greet them. “You did it!” she screamed. “You fucking did it! You bought the Post!” The chef had already gone home, so Elaine made them breakfast herself. Brady remembers floating home sometime before dawn, his stomach full of scrambled eggs and bacon.

  New York, a city of subway readers, gave Murdoch a warm welcome too. At a Christmas party Hamill, a true newspaper romantic who’d watched his beloved Post succumb to irrelevance in recent years, told Robert Lipsyte that he had high hopes. Hamill suggested that Lipsyte, a once and future Timesman, do a city-side column for the Post.

  “It could be great—me and Jimmy [Breslin] at the News, you and Murray [Murdoch had already rehired Kempton, also at Hamill’s urging] at the Post,” said Hamill. “We could really kick ass in this town.” The Post had soon signed Lipsyte up.

  “New York hasn’t had a first-rate newspaper rivalry since the Great Strike of 1961,” wrote Michael Kramer in More, a respected, if short-lived, journalism review. “And now, thanks to Australian newspaper magnate Rupert Murdoch, the good old days seem to be on their way back.”

  And what of Murdoch’s briny recipe for success—the blood, the guts, the boobs? That would never play here, Kramer, More’s editor in chief, confidently said. “His mix for the Big Apple is going to be a good deal more sophisticated.”

  6.

  The freer you make baseball in every respect, the better the game’s going to be. We saw that with Jackie Robinson. Jackie liberated the game. He was free. Free to steal home.* Free to turn a single into a double. Free to play the game with a sense of danger and urgency. That same sense of freedom should apply to free agency.

  DICK ALLEN

  SHORTLY before midnight on November 28, 1976, a camera crew from NBC-TV’s Grandstand show assembled on the tarmac at John F. Kennedy International Airport and waited for the arrival of an American Airlines flight from Oakland. The papers were reporting that the Yankees were about to sign the cream of baseball’s first crop of free agents, and NBC wanted to be there to record the athlete’s reaction to his new home.

  Figuring out what plane he’d be on had been easy enough. A staff member for the program called every airline that made the trip. “Hello. This is Mr. Reginald Jackson,” he said, “I’d like to reconfirm my reservation on your flight to New York.” After a few tries he reached an American Airlines representative who answered in the affirmative.

  At a few minutes past midnight Reggie Jackson stepped off the plane and into the bracing East Coast air with a blonde on his arm. The cameras were now rolling. A Grandstand reporter approached his six-foot, 207-pound subject and poked a microphone in his bespectacled face: “Welcome to New York, Reggie!”

  Jackson looked at the reporter, grinned, and asked, “What the fuck are you doing here?”

  The thirty-year-old slugger who had outgrown the tag superstar long ago—Sports Illustrated preferred superduperstar—proceeded to baggage claim. He picked up his valise, slipped on the hooded otter jacket that he had paid thirty-five hundred dollars for a week earlier in a boutique on Madison Avenue
, and climbed into the stretch limo that his new boss, George Steinbrenner, had sent to fetch him in the far reaches of Queens. It was black, with the Yankees’ symbol on the passenger door and the understated yet unmistakable vanity plate, “NYY.”

  The team’s director of public relations, Marty Appel, had arranged for a suite at the Americana Hotel in midtown. The concierge had assured Appel that Mr. Jackson was going to love it; Jimmy Carter and his wife had stayed there a few months earlier during the Democratic National Convention.

  Mr. Jackson hated it: The room had twin beds. He called Steinbrenner and threatened to turn around and go back to California if the situation wasn’t remedied immediately.

  Steinbrenner woke Appel at his house in Tarrytown and threw a fit of his own. Appel worked the phones for a while and eventually managed to secure a suite at the Plaza. When he called the front desk at the Americana to deliver the good news, he learned that Jackson and his friend had already gone upstairs. The presidential suite would have to do. He had a big day ahead of him.

  “I was always afraid of New York when I played there,” Jackson says of his pre-Yankees days. “I wasn’t really a city boy.” He was a suburban boy, born in 1947—the year that Jackie Robinson made his debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers—and raised in a two-story house in Wyncote, Pennsylvania, a predominantly white middle-class town just north of Philadelphia.

  Jackson’s father, Martinez Jackson, had been a professional ballplayer too, only that was back in the 1930s, when the game was still segregated. He was a small but scrappy second baseman, just like his son’s future nemesis, Billy Martin. Years later, long after he’d left baseball to go fight in World War II, Martinez filled his young son’s ears with stories from his barnstorming days, tales of sleeping in flophouses, of creeping into Southern towns late at night so as not to draw the attention of the local rednecks, of facing such legends as Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson. The Newark Eagles had paid him seven dollars a game, plus a little extra pocket money for driving the team bus.