9

Reggie and “Stacks”

When Linda abruptly moved across Central Park to her new West Side life with my best friend, I collected unanticipated benefits. Our rent-controlled two-bedroom apartment was converted to a co-op, and I became sole owner of a property worth far more than I paid for it. Soon I would sublet it to the statistician who worked on my college football play-by-play assignments, adding to my income as I relocated to a more glamorous high-rise several blocks farther south on Madison Avenue.

Meanwhile I was gradually making the transition from my initial ABC Sports status as a gimmick innovation to a legitimized member of the most high-profile announcer staff in television sports. I had been replaced on the college football sideline, first in 1977 by a woman named Anne Simon, then the following season by a former Maryland Terrapins player named Tim Brant. On regional football weekends I did play-by-play on the third-largest or fourth-largest regional game. When there was only one nationally televised game, I was often assigned to Wide World of Sports.

I was still gathering steam in college-town bars, and in New York I was increasingly omnipresent in the saloons along Third Avenue, where stories were propagated for the popular social record of that moment, a New York Post subsection titled “Page Six.” I was fascinated to note that the one person most adept at creating personal buzz through that vehicle was not an athlete or a showbiz personality, but of all things a real estate developer. I didn’t even know what that entailed. His name was Donald Trump. I was first introduced to him at P.J. Clarke’s restaurant and bar. Then later at Jim McMullen’s. Then again at Elaine’s. I began to gather that real estate development was perceived as a gateway to money. It wasn’t at first clear how much.

But money was endemic to the biggest change in the culture of American sports circa the late 1970s; the sudden arrival of free agency. A small handful of baseball players were successfully challenging the so-called reserve clause—the clause in their major league contracts that restricted them from negotiating with another team upon the expiration of the deal—and exploiting the marketplace at levels of compensation never seen in American sports. For New Yorkers, that meant 1977 was the first year Reggie Jackson spent in Yankees pinstripes.

I had first met Reggie in the off season, when in early January I had been sent to the most coveted of all Wide World assignments: three surfing competitions on the North Shore of Oahu: the Duke Kahanamoku Surfing Classic, the Pipeline Masters, and the Masters Female Surf. The work could extend to a couple of weeks if the weather was slow to cooperate with high breakers. That meant long days on the beach at the Kahala Hilton Hotel and long nights at a Waikiki bar/restaurant called Rex and Eric’s, where Reggie was a regular in the backgammon lounge and the discotheque.

And if you spent even 10 minutes in that disco, you were sure to be friendly with the deejay, a dramatic brunette with a loud laugh named Joanne Faith Mallis. To say she was outgoing was a vast understatement. She controlled a packed and deafening room every night, spinning and dancing, dancing and spinning, hugging every regular customer as they gradually filed in from dinner and drinks.

I met Reggie in the bar, and along with surfing director Andy Sidaris was introduced to Joanne in the disco. Andy didn’t really know her name, so he theatrically presented her to me as “stacks of wax,” referencing the pile of 45 rpm discs stacked up next to her turntables. (And in that moment Andy coined for her a nickname that stuck for the rest of her life, though when Ethel Kennedy and her children later shortened it to “Stacks,” it became more difficult to explain. Joanne didn’t seem to notice. She simply liked that General Maxwell Taylor called her “Stacks” at Ethel Kennedy’s lunch table just past the maître d’ stand at the 21 club in New York.)

Reggie made clear to me he saw himself as Joanne’s protector at Rex and Eric’s. I couldn’t tell what that entailed, other than that they knew each other and laughed uproariously at each other’s jokes. But everything within reach of her was an uproar. She had explosive energy and a dance playlist that lingered in my mind for weeks. Or months.

Until I saw Joanne next about six months later on a Manhattan street corner, waiting for a bus at Fifth Avenue and 53rd Street. I wasn’t sure she remembered me, but the fact she was waiting for a bus instead of hailing a cab or boarding a limo gave me functional control. I was single, we began dating, and I appreciated her telling me from the start she was seeing Reggie, too. They were “just friends.” He was “like a big brother” to her.

I believed it because I wanted to, and we were off and running. I had seen photos of Reggie with another woman, identified as a girlfriend, on Page Six. Sometimes we would meet up after a game on the East Side and all dine together.

New York was lonely without a main squeeze, and now I had one. Her elder sister was a famous architect. Her middle sister was a high-powered PR rep in fashion and design. Now I could go to Studio 54 with no worry about being recognized at the door. If I wanted, I could sit at Andy Warhol’s table.

As it is with many adolescents, college didn’t turn out as planned. That was Joanne, who grew up in an East Brooklyn waterside neighborhood. Pressured by a James Madison High School guidance counselor to apply somewhere, she had chosen New Mexico State for the modern architecture she saw in the brochure. It wasn’t until she landed in Las Cruces that she discovered an agricultural and mining school. The bounce had sent her all the way to Rex and Eric’s on Kalākaua Avenue, where she was a Honolulu-sized star.

Now she was back in New York and spending most of her time at my apartment. My friends from North Carolina met Joanne and their first impressions were that it was a bad match. We ran into Linda Lee Lampley (now Davis) at a thrift store one weekend, and she was wearing a Have you lost your mind? expression. That made it imperative to go forward.

When Reggie hit three home runs that fall against the Dodgers in Game 6 of the World Series, Joanne and I were there on tickets comped by Mister October himself.

When word got around at 1330 Sixth Avenue that I was social with him, I became the designated network-level Yankees locker-room guy. And when I really needed a tough access, a harder-to-get interview, number 44 would set it up for me.

If you liked anyone at all in that locker room, you liked 44. He was genuinely a prince, along with pitching star Ron Guidry, the nicest and most cooperative personality in an otherwise inflexible group. And they were not the only major superstars I knew to behave that way.

Ten years later in Los Angeles I found that Earvin “Magic” Johnson carried exactly that same trait. After tough losses, he greeted reporters at the Lakers’ locker room door with a welcoming smile. If you didn’t like Magic Johnson, you probably didn’t really like anyone. Even Larry Bird liked Magic Johnson.

Joanne Mallis and I were opposites who attracted at first. She was disco personified. I was strictly rock and roll. She was Brooklyn; I was Hendersonville and Chapel Hill. I had an undergraduate degree in English and a graduate school transcript that could become a master’s degree if I ever sat still for a couple of months and wrote a thesis. She had the weekend at New Mexico State that didn’t turn out like she’d planned.

I had a well-connected squadron of age-20-something friends at ABC Sports who worked and played together. Terry O’Neil (Notre Dame ’73) was a fast-rising producer who had first gained notoriety as the Olympic researcher who somehow had a bio on Soviet gymnast Olga Korbut at Munich in 1972 (even the Russian Federation knew next to nothing about her). Terry had also been Frank Gifford’s statistician on Monday Night Football. Dorrance Smith (Claremont ’73) had become my college football feature producer early in my first season on the sidelines. Ric LaCivita (Harvard ’74) succeeded Dorrance a year later as my closest friend and traveling companion. Jeff Ruhe (Stanford ’74) had vaulted from production assistant to becoming Roone Arledge’s personal associate when Dick Ebersol abruptly left ABC to go down the street to NBC. Jeff was also dating Robert F. Kennedy’s middle daughter, Courtney, which earned all of us eligibility for touch football games at Hickory Hill. Sean McManus (Duke ’75) was a production assistant and Jim McKay’s son and later the longtime head of CBS Sports.

I was at first apprehensive about blending Joanne into what I saw through my insecure filters as a socially rarified group. I couldn’t have been more wrong. They all wanted to dance at Studio 54, and she had the connections to get us in. And she shared with Courtney and her mother, Ethel, an abiding love for cigarettes, white wine, and french fries with mayonnaise. The Kennedys barely bothered to notice my devoted liberal politics, but they all noticed the dark drama of Joanne Mallis. It wasn’t terribly long before “she’s with Jim Lampley” gave way to “he’s with Stacks.” Courtney and Ethel couldn’t get enough of her.

So when it became clear that Courtney Kennedy was going to become Mrs. Jeff Ruhe, and in light of the inescapable reality I had already once been married and divorced, a certain pressure began to ratchet up. If there had been any competition at all between Reggie Jackson and me—and looking back, I’m pretty certain that was a delusion—it surely didn’t exist now. When I was on the road, I was on the phone with Joanne. When I was in New York, I was working or with Joanne.

When my mother came to the city to visit me, she was at first taken back by Joanne’s brassiness. But Mom was quickly charmed by her parents, who were earthy in a big way, and her sisters, who were educated and sophisticated.

Me? I had seldom felt more weak willed and out of control. Joanne had a disco music promotion job at a big label, Arista Records, which required her several times a week to go out to dance clubs in sexy dresses until all hours. I had given her a credit card, and when she walked back and forth to the office on 57th Street, it would cost me hundreds of dollars a day.

I don’t know how or where we got ahold of a marriage license. It was April 1979, and I was in London for the Rugby League Challenge Cup final with a crowd of 94,000 rowdy fans, most of them Yorkshiremen who had prepped overnight with countless ales on the train ride from the North country. The expert commentator was American football star Cris Collinsworth, working behind a microphone for the first time. We had a blast, and I don’t believe I told him I might again be getting married upon arrival back in New York the following day.

The limo showed up at JFK carrying Joanne, her sister Fern the famous PR rep, and a strikingly handsome architect friend named Scott Bromley. They were drinking champagne. We all donned matching cranberry polo shirts and went straight to a justice of the peace in the Bronx. Now I was married again on the very day I turned 30.

That night I was whisked to a surprise birthday party thrown by dozens of my close friends from Chapel Hill. The venue was the Broome Street Bar in Soho, coincidentally the first place I had taken Joanne on a date a little less than two years before. The idea was for all my closest friends to surprise me on my 30th. By the end of the evening, they were the ones most surprised. It would be more accurate to say “shocked.” They had never even met Joanne.

When I called my mother to give her the news, she didn’t try to muster enthusiasm. “Well, I just hope you will take this marriage more seriously than you did the first one.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.