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

by Jonathan Mahler

  Steinbrenner showed up in the clubhouse as batting practice was winding down and called the team together to tell them that he was giving Martin a reprieve, but that if they wanted to keep him, they had better get their acts together. And no more of this “race bullshit.” Steinbrenner sent Gabe Paul up to the press box with the news. The elevator was out of order, and Paul, who’d collapsed after suffering a mild stroke back in the spring, was red-faced and short of breath when he arrived.

  By now many of the writers were convinced there was something Freudian going on in the Reggie-Martin-Steinbrenner dynamic. Unable to win his boss’s affection or respect, the fatherless Martin had been reduced to acting out, both against Steinbrenner and Steinbrenner’s favorite son. “Martin was the emotional weakling of the trio,” recalls the Post’s Henry Hecht. “Reggie could be a creature of his emotions, but Martin was a mess.”

  A few minutes before that evening’s game in Detroit, Martin, who’d owned this gritty town when he’d managed here, ambled out to home plate for the lineup exchange. The Tigers’ fans rose from their hard, narrow seats and welcomed him back with a thunderous standing ovation. “Wasn’t that super?” Martin said, back in the dugout and beaming. Recalling that evening a couple of years later, he explained more fully the broad smile that had suddenly spread across his pinched face: “That must have really burned George’s ass.”

  23.

  IT wasn’t all bad being Reggie Jackson in the summer of 1977; if nothing else, he’d made a new friend, Ralph Destino.

  At the time Destino, the chairman of Cartier, was living in a swanky penthouse on Seventy-ninth and Park Avenue, just a couple of blocks away from Reggie. Between them, at Seventy-ninth and Madison, was a coffee shop with sticky banquettes and stainless steel tables called the Nectar where Reggie was taking his breakfast one morning when Destino’s wife, a fetching Italian, strolled in. Reggie set about chatting her up. Naturally, he began by introducing himself.

  Reggie Jackson? The name didn’t ring a bell. Mrs. Destino figured he was just some guy coming on to her. When she got back home, she asked her husband if he’d ever heard of this Reggie Jackson. The following morning, Destino insisted that they stake out the Nectar. Sure enough, Reggie walked in, and they invited him to join them for breakfast.

  Soon after, Destino and his wife separated. For the first time in many years he was a bachelor. The timing couldn’t have been better; by now he and Reggie Jackson were buddies. “There was a mutuality of interest,” Destino remembers. “He was being hammered by Billy Martin, and I was in a very distasteful divorce. He needed a pal, and I was available. There was nothing I could teach him about baseball, but I could show him New York—that I knew about.”

  And so Destino set his new friend up with his first model, a Bill Blass girl and the daughter of Fantasy Island star Ricardo Montalban. He also took Reggie to his first Broadway show, They’re Playing Our Song. After the play they had a late dinner at Sardi’s. From across the room Reggie spotted the actor Lee Marvin, who had just beaten back the first palimony suit ever attempted. Reggie raced across the room to introduce himself. “He told him how much he admired what he had just achieved,” Destino recalls. “Lee Marvin said, ‘I admire what you achieve too.’”

  Under Destino’s tutelage, Reggie became an expert on Cartier. He brought his dates to the company’s flagship Fifth Avenue store and lectured them on the various watches. (One afternoon, while waiting for Destino, whose office was above the store, Reggie got behind the counter and pretended to be a salesman.) Cars, Reggie already knew, and he regularly ragged Destino about the Lincoln Town Car’s Cartier edition, much as he teased Steinbrenner about driving domestic: “Lincolns are just Fords with big price tags.”

  Destino bathed in the reflected glory, as did his eleven-year-old son, who became a minicelebrity at his Upper East Side private school: He was the kid whose dad knew Reggie. “He’d come home and say my friend wants a Reggie Jackson autograph, can you get it for me?” remembers Destino. “So I would get a couple of them, but pretty soon ten kids wanted them, then fifteen. By that time Reggie’s signature was very familiar to me, so my son would say I need fifteen Reggie Jacksons, and I’d say okay. And after he’d go to bed, I would write fifteen Reggie Jacksons.”

  When he didn’t have a date with Steinbrenner at the Carlyle, Reggie continued to have breakfast with Destino at the Nectar. They’d hook up at night too. If Destino couldn’t make it to the ballpark, they would meet an hour after the game at Jim McMullen’s on Third Avenue between Seventy-sixth and Seventy-seventh Street.

  McMullen’s was by no means the hottest place in Manhattan. In fact, it wasn’t even the hottest place on the Upper East Side, not with Maxwell’s Plum still going strong over on Sixty-fourth and First Avenue. Warner LeRoy had opened Maxwell’s in 1966, the year after the Stork Club closed, which in retrospect does not seem like an accident of history. If the Stork carried New York from the dark days of the Depression through its postwar optimism, Maxwell’s, with its stained glass kaleidoscope ceiling, Tiffany lamps, and human buffet of bachelors and bachelorettes, arrived just in time to spirit the city through the swinging sixties and sordid seventies.

  Reggie and Destino tried Maxwell’s a couple of times, but once they had to wait for a table they vowed never to return. It was just as well. Maxwell’s may have had swinging singles, but McMullen’s had models. “At any given time,” recalls proprietor Jim McMullen, “we’d have two, three, four tables of the most beautiful women you’d ever want to see.” There was a simple reason for this: McMullen himself had modeled for Eileen Ford’s agency, and the two were still very close. Ford lived right around the corner from the restaurant in a town house on Seventy-eighth Street and always had a handful of young models in from out of town staying with her. As a favor to Jim, she’d send them over to eat at his place.

  The decor at McMullen’s was understated—modern, with some art nouveau touches. The walls were natural brick, with a few carved wood panels and etched mirrors. The food was simple too, mostly grilled and broiled fish and meat and chicken pot pie, the specialty of the house. The priciest item on the menu, the shell steak, was $9.95. Broiled chicken with potato and a vegetable went for $6.75. The restaurant didn’t take reservations, so the bar up front was always elbow to elbow, with jostling standbys four deep.

  Reggie usually had the swordfish, occasionally a steak, with a glass of wine or two, or maybe a beer. He often wore Gloria Vanderbilt jeans, a Polo shirt and loafers, and he always sat at table no. 40, which was in a small alcove in the far right-hand corner of the dining room. There he was protected from the great unwashed, but he could keep an eye on the scene. “Reggie liked to be seen, noticed, and not bothered—unless you were young and pretty,” says McMullen. (A few years later, when Reggie made a guest appearance on The Love Boat, the show’s writers had some fun with this idea of the semireluctant celebrity. Reggie goes on the cruise incognito so he won’t be pestered. Once he realizes that no one is recognizing him, however, he starts dropping subtle hints, then not so subtle hints. By the end of the cruise he’s doing jumping jacks on the Lido deck in a Yankees’ cap and sweats.)

  Rudy Giuliani (then a young prosecutor), Donald Trump, and Cheryl Tiegs all were fixtures at McMullen’s, as was Steinbrenner, but Reggie was the only ballplayer who ate there. “I used to get mostly professional tennis players—Rod Laver, Bjorn Borg, Chris Evert, John McEnroe, Vitas Gerulaitis,” recalls McMullen. “It really was more of a hangout for tennis players. Baseball players tend not to be very sophisticated.”

  On any given night, you could set your watch by the evolution of the scene at McMullen’s. At 6 p.m. the restaurant was filled to capacity with blue-haired, old-money Upper East Siders. With each successive seating, the crowd grew younger and more stylish. Out with navy blazers and dull penny loafers, in with backless dresses and eight-millimeter pearls. McMullen, suave and handsome with a thick mane of prematurely white hair, moved among each age-group flawlessly. By
1 a.m. twenty black limousines would be lined up out front on Third Avenue, waiting to transport revelers seamlessly to their next nocturnal playpen, Studio 54.

  “We went to Studio 54 like it was part of the evening,” says Destino. “It was so hot then that there would always be a throng on the sidewalk begging, trying to get in, doing anything that they possibly could. But Reggie would walk through that crowd like Moses through the river. The sea would part.”

  Reggie Jackson was living two different lives. Away from the ballpark, he was discovering New York, superstar-style, doing late-night laps around Central Park with a date, top down, Donna Summer or the O’Jays blasting.

  At the same time, Reggie was starting to dread the game he loved. He was waking up in the middle of the night and wandering out to his balcony twenty stories above Fifth Avenue, where he’d stare out at the New York City skyline and wonder how he was going to make it through the summer. (At least this was the portrait he painted for a writer from Esquire a few months later.) “He was confused,” Destino recalls. “He couldn’t understand why his manager acted the way he did. He couldn’t understand why the other players acted the way they did. What upset him was his failure to understand why. ‘Why are they doing this to me?’”

  24.

  “NOW is the summer of our discotheques,” wrote night-crawling journalist Anthony Haden-Guest in New York magazine in June 1977. “And every night is party night.”

  It would have been hard to argue with him. Studio 54, the discotheque that defined an entire era of nightlife, had opened two months earlier, and Paramount Pictures had just begun filming Saturday Night Fever. By the end of the summer disco would be America’s second-largest-grossing entertainment business, behind only professional sports.

  Disco even had its own top forty charts. In stark contrast with the protest music of the sixties, most disco songs were about dancing and disporting. This was no coincidence, nor was the timing of the explosion of New York’s dance scene. “People have always lost themselves in dancing when the economy’s been bad,” Bob Casey, the president of the National Association of Discotheque Disk Jockeys, told a Daily News reporter in the summer of 1975, as the city was sliding toward bankruptcy. “The discos are now doing exactly the same thing that the big dance halls with the crystal chandeliers did during the Depression. Everyone’s out to spend their unemployment check, their welfare: to lose themselves.”

  Like any fad that seems to erupt into the national consciousness, this one had been percolating below ground for years: in gay hot spots along the abandoned West Side waterfront, in the vacant sweatshops south of Houston Street, in the dingy recreation rooms of Bronx and Brooklyn housing projects, in the empty ballrooms of aging midtown hotels.

  If New York’s disco scene had a party zero, it was David Mancuso’s Love Saves the Day bash on Valentine’s Day 1970. Mancuso had been throwing informal dance parties in his $175-a-month downtown loft for years, but this time he sent out invitations and collected $2 at the door. The sound system, his stereo, already in place, Mancuso hung a bobbing mirrored ball from the seventeen-foot ceiling, inflated several hundred multicolored balloons, and lined the edges of the space with church pews so revelers would have a place to rest. The image on the invites—Salvador Dalí’s melting clocks—was easily deciphered: Once you tumbled down the rabbit hole and into Mancuso’s wonderland, all sense of time would be suspended. And it was. At daybreak a shirtless Mancuso was still spinning vinyl, and about a hundred people of varying ethnicities, sexual preferences, and classes were still clamoring for more. A weekly tradition was soon born.

  The parties started at a little before midnight on Saturday and ran until six or seven Sunday morning. Mancuso handled the music himself, using two turntables to ease dancers from one song to the next, lifting them up, and gently coaxing them back down as he moved seamlessly between soul, rock, R & B, Motown, and Afro-Latino. Sometimes he turned off all the lights and just let the music play. When he did, the dancers invariably screamed. “Dancing at the Loft was like riding a wave of music, being carried along as one song after another built relentlessly to a brilliant crest and broke, bringing almost involuntary shouts of approval from the crowd then smoothed out, softened, and slowly began welling up to another peak,” was how disco journalist Vince Aletti described the experience in The Village Voice.

  Ignited by this small spark, an underground dance culture started to spread to other unmarked lofts and hotel ballrooms. “The whole scene was a response to the sixties,” says Michael Gomes, an early disco devotee who moved to New York from Toronto in 1973. “Instead of changing the world, we wanted to create our own little world.” In the mass of bodies, sexual boundaries became porous: “It wasn’t gay or straight. It was just this blur where you were caught up in the music.”

  The ethos of this emerging subculture was continuous dancing. In its name, borders of neighborhood, class, and ethnicity were crossed. “From the Bronx, you could get on a train at certain parts of the night—two or three in the morning—and it was like rush hour,” recalls Mark Riley, a Bronx resident and disco fanatic.

  The Bronx’s own fledgling dance culture, one that eventually blossomed into hip-hop, was simultaneously gestating. It was less formal than the new wave of discotheques; a DJ might set up his table in a playground, run extension cords into the nearest lamppost, and start playing. The Bronx DJs had their own style, pioneered by the Jamaican-born Kool Here in the rec room of the housing project his family lived in, which featured quick, choppy cuts and talking over the music—future trademarks of rap that would not have gone over well in the Manhattan dance clubs. But there was stylistic overlap as well. “All of the DJs were blending songs together,” says John Benitez, who started DJing at block parties and sweet sixteens in his South Bronx neighborhood in the early seventies before breaking into the Manhattan club scene.

  As dance clubs multiplied, DJs turned into minor celebrities. They didn’t just play music; they made music. Record companies soon discovered their ability to sell records as well. Not only were they deluging DJs with promotional singles and dispatching scouts to dance clubs, but they also began producing their own extended play disco mixes exclusively for the discotheques. None of the hard-core dance clubs sold alcohol, but there were always plenty of drugs, chiefly acid, amyl nitrate, pot, mescalin, coke, Quaaludes (also known as disco biscuits), and speed.

  With their flashing lights and pansexual crowds, the new clubs were a far cry from the old dance halls where the first- and second-generation immigrant parents of outer borough teenagers and twenty-somethings had done the fox-trot, which caused some confusion. “What my old man doesn’t understand is that you don’t have to be a fag to be into this scene,” Tony Pagano, a young man from Staten Island, told the writer Ed McCormack for the 1976 book Dancing Madness. Between the music’s ecstatic peaks and the undulating tangle of bodies on the dance floor, it was impossible not to see a connection between sex and disco. (As Esquire’s Albert Goldman put it in 1978, “All disco is implicitly orgy.”)

  Manhattan socialites were dancing too. That was the crowd that most interested steak house impresario Steve Rubell—before getting into discos, he owned a chain of upscale Sizzlers called the Steak Loft—and his business partner, Ian Schrager. The question they faced in 1976 was how to get them to Douglaston, Queens, the site of their disco, the Enchanted Garden, a place where, on any given night, the seven blow dryers in the women’s room outnumbered the VIPs on the dance floor. New York’s disco diva Carmen d’Alessio provided the answer.

  Since coming to New York in 1965, the Peruvian-born d‘Alessio had worked as a translator for the United Nations and logged a stint in public relations for Yves Saint Laurent, but in more recent years she had discovered her true calling, party planning. When Rubell and Schrager first spotted her in the winter of ’76, she was wearing a bikini and dancing on the shoulders of a tall black male model at a Brazilian Carnival theme party she’d organized. Rubell and Schrager persuaded d�
�Alessio to come work for them. For her first party at the Enchanted Garden, d’Alessio chose an Arabian Nights theme, complete with elephants, llamas, and camels.

  In early ‘77, d’Alessio was asked to promote another disco. This one had not yet opened. It was to be housed in Ed Sullivan’s old theater on Fifty-fourth Street and Eighth Avenue. Much of the funding was to come from art dealer Frank Lloyd—that is, until a court found Lloyd guilty of defrauding the estate of the late Mark Rothko. Lloyd absconded to the Bahamas, and d’Alessio turned to the owners of the Enchanted Garden for financing. Before long Rubell and Schrager had pushed out the putative front man and were planning an April 1977 debut for their new disco, Studio 54.

  In addition to any celebrity whose address she could beg, borrow, or steal, d’Alessio sent invitations to everyone on the mailing list of the Ford Modeling Agency, Andy Warhol’s Factory, and the Islanders, a group of several thousand gay men who summered on Fire Island. Come opening night, the place was mobbed. “My mother had to be carried in over the crowd,” d’Alessio recalls.

  Studio 54 took the escapist ethic of the disco scene to its absurd extreme. An outsize prop of the Man on the Moon shoveling a coke spoon under his nose, shirtless busboys in white satin gym shorts and sequined jockstraps, busty women hanging upside down from trapezes, a fifty-four-hundred-square-foot dance floor crowded with undulators, balconies crowded with fornicators—this wasn’t about avoiding reality as much as it was about obliterating it. Yet at the same time, Studio’s Rome-in-the-twilight-of-the-empire feel seemed very much in keeping with this moment in the life of New York. At a birthday party for Bianca Jagger not long after its debut, the rock star’s wife was led around the dance floor on a white horse by a man and woman with circus costumes painted on their naked bodies, all to the strains of the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil.” If this wasn’t a sign of the coming apocalypse, what was? “I don’t know if I was in heaven or hell,” Lillian Carter, mother of President Jimmy, reflected on her first visit there. “But it was wonderful.”