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?’”