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

by Jonathan Mahler

  Guidry spent the ’76–’77 off-season hunting in the duck blinds of rural Louisiana. He reported to camp in the spring of ’77 for the first half of a two-year sixty-thousand-dollar contract, having not thrown a baseball since the fall. Guidry vainly set about trying to blow waist-high fastballs by every hitter he faced. Martin’s patience quickly wore thin. “Tell me somebody you can get out,” he told Guidry, “and I’ll let you pitch to him.”

  Guidry was beginning to wonder if he could get anybody out. By the end of the exhibition season his ERA had swelled to 10.24. Both Steinbrenner and Martin, in rare agreement, wanted to send him back to Syracuse, but Gabe Paul convinced them otherwise.

  Guidry did some mop-up work during the first few weeks of the season. On April 29, with the Yankees set to host the Mariners at the stadium, Martin found himself in a bind. His scheduled starter, Mike Torrez, whom the Yankees had just acquired for Dock Ellis, had not yet reported to New York. Martin’s only rested starters, Catfish Hunter and Don Gullett, both were hurt. An hour before game time Torrez was scratched. Guidry would be starting for the first time since the Carolina League, circa 1973.

  Ten minutes into the game, Guidry still couldn’t find the plate. There was one out, and the lowly Mariners had loaded the bases on a hit and two walks. Guidry stepped off the rubber, kneaded his Levi Garrett chaw, discharged a mouthful of brown juice, and started snapping off sliders. Two strikeouts later he was out of trouble. He went on to pitch a 3–0 shutout.

  When Torrez showed up, Guidry was sent back to the bullpen. With all the injuries to the Yankee staff, though, he continued to make spot starts and eventually worked himself into the rotation. The more Guidry threw the slider, the more it came to resemble Lyle’s, only harder.

  By the middle of August, Guidry was leading the team in strikeouts, and his ERA was just a shade above 3.00. He was still unknown, untested, so no one dared say it out loud, but the way the left-hander dispensed with hitters—hypnotizing them with heat and then bringing them to with that hard, tumbling slider thrown from the identical arm angle—was reminiscent of Sandy Koufax’s fastball-curve one-two. Of course, all he was doing, as Guidry himself said, was throwing a baseball as hard as he could in the vicinity of Munson’s mitt: “Usually my ball is so alive it’s not gonna do what I want.”

  Guidry’s postgame routine was no less straightforward than his approach to pitching. He’d drink a grape soda in front of his locker, give the writers a few quotes in his Cajun drawl about how he’d felt on the mound that night, then drive home to his apartment in Bogota, New Jersey, where he’d open a Coors and set a couple of steaks on the grill for him and his wife.

  In Texas on August 21, a week before his twenty-eighth birthday, Guidry fanned eight, picking up his tenth victory of the season and pushing the Yankees past the Orioles and within a half game of the Red Sox. By now both Martin and Steinbrenner were claiming credit for sticking with him.

  Two nights later, a rainy, miserable one at Comiskey, Torrez was on the mound and the Yankees and White Sox were knotted at three in the seventh when Mickey Rivers drove in the go-ahead run. In the eighth, Reggie delivered Munson with a single to give the Yanks some breathing room. Graig Nettles made it a blowout with a three-run home run through the wet, whipping Chicago wind.

  The Yankees returned to New York early the next morning. They were fourteen of their last sixteen, and twenty-three and nine since the All-Star break. With a little help from the suddenly slumping Red Sox, they led the American League East by a half game.

  48.

  ON August 24, two weeks before the Democratic primary, the results from the most recent New York Times / Channel 2 News survey put Abzug and Beame in a dead heat, with both Cuomo and Koch within striking distance.

  Beame had nothing to complain about considering that five weeks earlier, in the aftermath of the blackout, his prospects had seemed dimmer than ever. “[I]t is too much to expect you to recover once you wake up on a morning when your city is thoroughly ashamed of itself and you are its Mayor and its symbol,” Murray Kempton wrote on July 19, reckoning that the blackout had reduced the field of legitimate mayoral contenders to two, Abzug and Cuomo.

  Kempton had underestimated the privileges of incumbency. Between his daily press conferences and regular walking tours of looted, burned neighborhoods, the city’s mayor was at the center of much of the media’s postblackout coverage. Beame had also made some savvy political moves, writing off the uncertain prospect of a presidential endorsement, opting instead to assail Carter both for his unwillingness to declare New York a disaster area and for his failure to make good on his preelection pledge to federalize welfare. Out of fidelity to the code of the Democratic clubhouse, almost all the local union leaders and political bosses were lining up to endorse Beame. By the end of July he was climbing steadily in the polls. His reversal on the death penalty was followed by a series of anticrime commercials. One, a radio spot, quoted Abzug pontificating on the social and economic causes of the blackout looting. Another, this one on TV, showed the tiny mayor, crowned by a hard hat, before a sea of blue uniforms, against the tagline “Mayor Beame. He’s fighting your fight against crime.” By the middle of August, Beame was again a frontrunner.

  But Kempton had made an even bigger miscalculation with respect to Abzug, the leading candidate through the first half of July. Abzug had been out of town when the lights went out, but her campaign staff hustled her back to New York, where thousands of new leaflets—“Vote Bella: She’s the Greatest Energy Source in America”—awaited her. Abzug promptly launched an attack on Con Ed, urging New Yorkers to “refuse to pay any more to this rapacious monopoly.”

  On Friday, July 15, Abzug became the first mayoral candidate to visit what was left of Bushwick. After touring the decimated neighborhood, she stopped by Bed-Stuy’s Eighty-first Precinct, which had worked alongside Bushwick’s Eighty-third during the long night of looting. Looking smart in a polka-dot sundress and white straw hat, Abzug defended her increasingly unpopular position of giving cops the right to strike.

  “But what would you have done if the police had been on strike during the blackout?” one distressed community resident asked.

  “Mobilize the community organizations and get them into the streets,” Abzug replied.

  “The community was mobilized,” another resident volunteered. “They were all out looting.”

  Abzug held her tongue, but in the subsequent weeks, as she moved about the boroughs of a changed city, it became harder and harder for her to keep her infamous temper in check. As she campaigned one late July afternoon at the pool of a beach club in Canarsie, Brooklyn, an Italian enclave surrounded by poor black neighborhoods, Abzug’s lap around the ring of card tables was halted by a man questioning her support for school busing. They argued, and the man called her a bigot. “Hitler spread the big lie too,” she screamed back at him.

  Abzug regained her composure and pressed on, but moments later, as Roberta Kapper recounted in the Soho Weekly News, Abzug was arguing with someone else who believed that the cops should have shot the looters. Abzug said that if she’d been mayor, she would have called in the National Guard. Now an older woman chimed in, telling Abzug that she didn’t believe her, that Abzug didn’t care about people like her. “Then go vote for that schmuck we have now,” Abzug spit back. “I’m ahead in the polls.”

  Not for long. As July gave way to August, Abzug’s popularity was ebbing. That one of the candidates gaining ground on her was Ed Koch made her all the more spiteful. Abzug and Koch were enemies of long standing. Their feud had begun in 1968, when Koch refused to march in an anti-Vietnam protest organized by a group Abzug chaired, not because he was in favor of the war but because he believed the group was a Communist front. Since then, neither one of them had missed an opportunity to say something nasty about the other. During Abzug’s ’76 Senate race Koch had volunteered to a reporter that New York State would be better off with someone else. Abzug stormed up to Koch on the floor of
the House an hour later and called him “a divisive bastard.” She had not spoken to him since.

  Upon hearing in late July that Koch had accepted a three-thousand-dollar campaign donation from Al Goldstein, the publisher of Screw magazine, Abzug had her staff produce a new leaflet: “You can’t claim to be against pornography—and then take money from the smut peddlers. Ed Koch thinks he can.” (“The treasurer of the Episcopal Church gave me $3,000, but that doesn’t mean I’m Episcopalian,” answered Koch, who’d been imploring Abzug “not to be the demagogue you usually are.”)

  The truth is that liberalism’s retreat was throwing Abzug off stride. In the past she had always buttressed her stridency with a lawyerly attention to detail. During her movement days, she’d produced pamphlets that laid out exactly how many schoolteachers New York could employ for each B-52 bomber being sent to Vietnam. But as the ‘77 campaign entered its final weeks, she was resorting increasingly to generalities. Following Abzug one sweltering mid-August afternoon in Rego Park, Queens, The Village Voice’s Geoffrey Stokes heard her answer a question about what she’d do for the neighborhood with what Stokes, an Abzug supporter, described as “a disconnected attack on ‘the special interests.’”

  This was no longer the New York Abzug had once known. “She thought the city was out of control,” her press secretary, Harold Holzer, recalls. “She thought it was beyond our control to remind people of what Lincoln would call the better angels of our nature, to remind them of possibilities, to remind them that harmony was more important than punitiveness. God knows it was impossible to say that people who pillaged in some pathetic effort to express anger should be pitied almost as much as punished. There was no way to get through the mood, between the murders and the heat and the blackout looting.”

  There were some bad breaks too. Rolling Stone was working on a story with Abzug, a first-person account of her favorite spots in the city, only instead of photographing her, editor Jann Wenner had commissioned Andy Warhol to paint her portrait. It was all set to run on the cover of a special issue devoted to New York, the magazine’s new home. For Abzug, the timing could not have been better; the magazine would be on newsstands from the last week in August right up to the September 8 primary. But just as Rolling Stone’s editors were making their final tweaks, Elvis Presley died. The New York issue was promptly shelved. When it was resurrected a little more than a month later, the introductory editorial still wished Abzug “good luck,” but the primary had already passed.

  At least US magazine managed to run its feature on Abzug’s diet, which began, “With a Little Help from Shirley MacLaine, Buxom Bella Abzug Is Losing Pounds While Gaining Votes.” Actually, US had it backward. Abzug’s campaign staff had discovered the virtues of food as a sedative and kept a cooler filled with nuts and yogurt in the back of the campaign car. By late August, as Abzug’s once-comfortable lead continued to shrivel, she had added about ten pounds to her already full figure. Unable to fit into her dress when the US photographer arrived, Abzug was reduced to holding it up in front of herself.

  49.

  IN 1860 an Illinois lawyer and Republican presidential candidate named Abraham Lincoln gave his first speech in New York—his soon-to-be-famous “Right Makes Might” address—in the Great Hall at Cooper Union College. Some fifty years later, in the wake of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, thousands of immigrant workers gathered in the same room for the rally that launched one of the most important uprisings in the history of the labor movement. And on August 30, 1977, an event far less memorable yet still irresistibly symbolic took place within these hallowed halls. In the waning moments of a debate for the upcoming mayoral primary, an evening punctuated by frequent intervals of hooting and jeering, a chubby, balding man rose from his seat and hurled an apple pie at Mayor Beame.

  The pie completed its journey just seconds after Beame, reaching the end of his ninety-second summation, had said: “Tough decisions were needed, and I made ’em.” It was one of Beame’s campaign slogans, a line he’d been using to good effect all summer, but the events of the past two weeks, surely the worst stretch of the seventy-one-year-old mayor’s political career, hadn’t merely undermined the claim; they had made a mockery of it.

  Beame’s troubles began in mid-August, when word leaked from Washington that the Securities and Exchange Commission was about to release its long-awaited report on New York City’s fiscal crisis. The SEC had started its investigation, one of the largest in its history, in early 1976. Six months later Beame’s lawyers were in court, trying to block the probe, arguing that the federal commission didn’t have the right to examine how the city went about issuing securities. In late ’76, Beame, who had just sat through a five-hour interrogation by the commission’s lawyers, dropped the case. As the mayor explained later, he’d done so because the SEC assured him that the report was imminent. He figured its findings would be long forgotten when it came time for New Yorkers to choose their next mayor.

  The report never came, and by the middle of July the conventional wisdom was that it would be delayed until after the primary. Joel Harnett, a long shot mayoral candidate, accused the Carter administration of deliberately holding up the report and filed his own suit in federal court demanding its prompt release. Several other candidates quickly echoed Harnett’s charges. Wary of leaving the impression that it was meddling in local politics, the White House made it clear that it too wanted the SEC report out as soon as possible. On July 31 the Daily News’s Ken Auletta quoted a lawyer for the commission saying he would be “dramatically surprised if it was not out before the primary.”

  The commission kept quiet about the progress of the investigation, but a couple of weeks later Beame learned that it had dispatched a task force, including several high-ranking officials, to New York to expedite its completion. Beame grew nervous. Desperate to do something to get out in front of the report, to blunt its potential impact, he decided to release the transcript of his lengthy interrogation. On the morning of August 17, as the mayor’s staff handed out copies of his 222-page testimony to reporters, Beame accused the SEC of playing politics by suddenly rushing to complete its investigation. The mayor said he was making the transcript public in order to encourage “a reasoned public evaluation prior to the primary election.”

  The actual effect was closer to that of a good movie trailer. By offering a glimpse of the SEC’s line of questioning, Beame’s testimony only whetted the public’s appetite for the full report. Among other things, the commission had grilled the mayor about inflating anticipated revenues and understating expected spending as a means of balancing its budget. Beame insisted that he knew of no such practice. “The mayor,” he said, “has got enough things to do besides sitting down and estimating revenues for the city.”

  More tantalizing still, the transcript revealed that Mayor Beame had met several times with David Rockefeller, the chairman of Chase Manhattan, and Walter Wriston, the head of Citibank, in early 1975, when Beame was still assuring investors that the city was on firm financial footing. The SEC asked the mayor if Rockefeller, Wriston, or any one of the other high-level bankers present at the meetings had warned him that New York was at risk of being cut off from the credit market, a critical source of badly needed capital. Beame said he couldn’t remember.

  The press was merciless. “To hear His Honor tell it, he was nothing but an innocent bystander, a detached observer,” the Daily News sputtered in an August 19 editorial headlined SIMPLY INCREDIBLE. “This, remember, comes from a man who won election in 1973 by convincing voters that he knew municipal finances from A to Z, could put more cops on the street, improve services and balance the books … With that attitude at the top, it’s a wonder New York didn’t wind up being auctioned off at a sheriff’s sale.”

  A few days later Beame managed to dig his hole even deeper when he publicly questioned the integrity of Robert Haft, the author of the forthcoming report. “It seems to smell to high heaven,” the mayor charged on the radio station WINS, after
explaining that Haft had recently resigned from a Manhattan law firm where several principals were involved in the Cuomo campaign. Beame also fired off a letter of protest to Harold M. Williams, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, who answered that it was the mayor, not his commission, who was guilty of playing politics.

  The report was finally completed thirteen days before the mayoral primary. The members of the New York press corps wedged themselves into the classroom-style desks arrayed around the press room of the SEC’s Washington headquarters and waited for their copies. No fewer than forty staff members had been involved in its preparation over the course of the past nineteen months, perusing 250,000 documents and twelve thousand pages of testimony along the way. This was to be the definitive analysis of how the biggest, richest city in the world had gone bust. “Is it too late to drop this class?” joked the Times’s Steven Weisman when copies of the ten-pound report were distributed around the room.

  At least no one had any trouble finding the headline. The Post was the first of the New York papers to hit the street with the story on the afternoon of August 26. Its editors had whittled the 952-page report down to four words set in towering type across page one: BEAME CONNED THE CITY.

  As Beame’s testimony had suggested, much of the report turned on the question of disclosure. The SEC determined that the bankers had warned the mayor, not once but on four separate occasions between the end of ’74 and the spring of ’75, that the city’s securities offerings were in jeopardy. Moreover, the commission accused the mayor of “deceptive practices masking the city’s true and disastrous financial condition.”