http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/story/224394p-192771c.html
Booze & Broads By MARK KRIEGEL Saturday, August 21st, 2004
End Zone
Excerpted from "Namath," a biography published by Viking for release tomorrow.
It was October, an autumn for all that Jimmy Cannon held dear. A quarter of a century had passed since Joe DiMaggio's hitting streak, and fifteen years since Joe Louis's last fight. The athletes Cannon commemorated as avatars of the strong, silent virtues were no longer athletes. Like him, they were on the far side of middle age.
Cannon was 56. His column now appeared in something called the World Journal Tribune. Nicknamed "the Widget," it was a hastily assembled combination formed from the remains of the Journal-American, the World-Telegram and Sun, and the Herald Tribune. Those papers, like so much of Cannon's New York, had been rendered obsolete or extinct in this age of television. The Widget itself only had a few more months to live.
Today, October 17, 1966, Jimmy Cannon was scheduled to interview Joe Namath. If it were his call, they probably would've met at Shor's. But it wasn't his call, was it? The kid had only been here two years, but already he was as big as Mickey Mantle, which was to say, bigger than anyone else in town. Namath wanted to meet at a joint on 49th off Second. They ought to call this kid Second Avenue Joe.
The sky was a flash of periwinkle - "Garish dusk," as Cannon would describe it. The joint was called the Pussycat. The short, sweet-faced girl at the hat check was called JoJo, and her boyfriend, a corpulent Lucchese gangster, was known as Mr. Gribs. His real name was Carmine Tramunti. He was treated with great respect in the Pussycat, as was another wiseguy, Tommy (Tea Balls) Mancuso. But none of that concerned the old sportswriter or the young quarterback. Joe was much more interested in the Chinese food, spare ribs with duck sauce and mustard and pork fried rice. The Pussycat aspired to be like Jilly's with a younger crowd. The girls were a good draw. The dancers from the Copa ate for free. The Bunnies from the Playboy Club were on scholarship, too. Namath liked the girls even better than the pork fried rice.
The bartender was setting up for cocktail hour. They didn't have bartenders like this in Cannon's day. Her name was Linda. The way she was dressed reminded Cannon of a bathing suit with stockings. He was a long way from Shor's.
Now, at the Pussycat, Namath ordered a beer.
Cannon, who hadn't had a drink in years, was obliged to give the kid his due. "This guy doesn't try to duck it," he would write. "He knew what I intended to interview him about. This is where he chose to meet me. It was as though he would be a phoney if he had steered me to a squarer place."
The meeting had been occasioned by Namath's performance in Houston the day before. The issue wasn't the four interceptions, but the bitterly facetious remarks about booze and broads that required clarification. The partying, Namath declared, had nothing to do with the defeat. "Why don't they accept we just got beat?" he asked. Namath insisted he'd never do anything to jeopardize his career. He studied the game. He got his sleep. "I'm not going to let having a good time affect my physical status," he said. "The way some people put it, they got me an alcoholic."
Namath tapped his beer glass with his thumb, as if to remind the columnist that this had all been caused by the insidious politics of appearance, the gossip that fills the gaps between reputation and reality. Cannon gladly took Joe at his word. Then again, there was a reason ballplayers weren't supposed to hang out in places like the Pussycat.
"I'm no hypocrite," said Namath. "I don't hide anything."
That was a curious concept for a man of Cannon's generation, for whom subterfuge was an accepted practice, especially for a star ballplayer dealing with the rigors of public life. Shor's, and all the places like it, were men's clubs. Booze was the sacrament. But broads were something different. Broads were mostly a secret vice. How many times had DiMaggio borrowed the keys to Cannon's room at the Edison Hotel? In public, DiMaggio appeared regal and expressionless. He considered fame an irritant, an embarrassment. Fame was a bright beam in his eyes. But when the lights went down, the Dago came alive.
Joe Louis was another one who epitomized the wordsmith's notion of wordless grace. But the maintenance of such dignity was a burden. For Louis, the price of fame remained a secret - just like all the tea he smoked to ease his mind.
And now this Namath had the balls to sit there with a beer and proclaim: I have nothing to hide.
He resided in a penthouse with a llama-skin rug that looked like dry ice - or so all the magazines said. There was an oval-shaped bed with a mirror suspended above.
Who'd have thought Cannon would live to see a football player living like a space-age pimp? Still, unlike these other creatures of television, Cannon couldn't help but like the kid.
"He doesn't have to sneak around," he wrote. "He goes where the action is."
Even as he sat there with his beer, Namath posed the question: Was something a vice if you didn't have to lie about it? Or was the real sin, as Cannon might have put it, phoniness?
In Namath, one saw fame without fear. In the men's clubs Cannon inhabited, booze was an end in itself. But in Joe's New York, booze and the broads ran together, everything from the same spigot.
As garish dusk gave way to another moist night, the old sportswriter had to be wondering: What was it like to be a prince of this new city? What was it like to be Broadway Joe of Second Avenue?
* * *
Booze and broads were similar opiates, administered differently. They eased the pain. They eased the nerves. Where there had been an arthritic vise or a knot in the gut, they left a spray of endorphins. Booze and broads were to be taken liberally and casually, for medication and recreation. "I drink for the same reason I keep company with girls," Namath once said. "It makes me feel good. It takes away the tension." Tad Dowd, who didn't drink, came up with a name for Namath's girls: "tension easers." Namath, to his later chagrin, had started calling them foxes.
First among Joe's foxes was the wondrously named Suzie Storm. One of the magazine writers assigned to profile Joe that season described her as "a rock-'n'-roll chickie." But that doesn't begin to do her justice. She was a navy brat from Pensacola, still in college, majoring in French. She enjoyed museums as much as she did bars. Suzie Storm was the pure drug, uncut: slim but ample-chested, with straight blond hair. She was southern groovy, and she could sing her ass off. "I don't know where she got it from," says Dowd, who was still managing Mary Wells. "But that voice was like the white woman's answer to Tina Turner."
Eventually, Joe would talk of marrying Suzie Storm. But such talk was still a few years away, for he was too busy sampling the many and varied gifts bestowed upon him at night. "I don't like to date so much as I just like to kind of, you know, run into somethin', man," Namath told Dan Jenkins, a Sports Illustrated writer who would go on to write the blockbuster novel "Semi-Tough".
Broadway Joe couldn't help but run into something. The girls were just there - at the Open End, where the pimps hung out; at the western-motifed Dudes 'N Dolls, where they worked as teepee dancers; at Mr. Laff's and the Pussycat and the Cheetah and Small's Paradise up in Harlem. Namath made the same connection as his father, finding something almost patriotic in the pursuit of (women). "Seems almost un-American to me for a bachelor not to go around having a drink with a lady now and then," he once said through his signature grin, part put-on, part leer.
The rube from Alabama had learned fast. By '66 Joe knew his way through the Manhattan night. Tad Dowd recalls bouncing around town with Namath and Tom Jones, another of his pals. They were leaving a place called the Phone Booth. Tad was trailing the Namath entourage when he spied that famous duo, Emeretta and Winona, looking as good as ever. But they were already comfortably ensconced at a table with Mick Jagger and the Stones. "C'mon, girls, let's go," said Tad, gleefully waving his stogie. "We're having a party at Joe's place."
Winona and Emeretta promptly picked up their purses and followed him out the door.
"What were they going to say?" asks Tad. "You want to be with Jagger and the Stones? Or you want to be with Joe Namath?"
An invitation to Joe's place was not to be passed up.
"I was a healthy young American boy," he said.
The guys who bitched about the women's libbers missed the whole point. Let Jimmy Cannon put a nickel in the jukebox to hear Sinatra lament the loser, "Set 'em up, Joe." The new city's anthem had just been released. It was James Brown, one of Joe's favorites, belting out "It's a Man's Man's Man's World." This was Men's Lib. You could get everything you wanted, booze and broads, under one roof.
"It was great," said Art Heyman, a professional basketball player who had a piece of a bar called the Bishop's Perch. "All the girls wanted to get laid by Joe. Everybody got leftovers."
Being around Joe meant your cup runneth over with yum-yum.
"I was taught that sex is a mortal sin," says David Kennedy, for whom confession was a weekly event. He went late Saturday afternoon, mostly to St. Patrick's, hoping to find an indulgent priest. He didn't want the ones who made you feel as if you would dwell for eternity in a lake of fire, even though anyone who'd seen Winona and Emeretta in their prime wouldn't find lakes of fire to be much of a deterrent. But even as he confessed, Kennedy knew that in a matter of hours he'd be with Joe and the boys, eagerly committing the same sins for which he was now repenting. It was a lot easier to stop going to confession than to stop going out.
Namath, for his part, suffered no such guilt. He said a prayer of thanks most nights, but would not ask to be forgiven for fornication. "So I stopped going to church," he said. "I wasn't going to go to confession and lie."
* * *
Thus said the high priest of lush life, a man who thought nothing of ordering beer for breakfast, just to get his bearings after a rough night. "A Miller, right away, no coffee," recalls Spiros Dellartas, a waiter at the Green Kitchen who became a friend. The Green Kitchen was near the corner of 77th and First. By then, Joe, Ray, and Joe Hirsch (when he was in town) were living down the block, at 370 East 76th Street, in the penthouse of the Newport East, an exclusive new apartment building teeming with stews and nightclub owners. Renting for $500 a month, their apartment had an expansive terrace affording a great view the Manhattan skyline. The penthouse became a kind of temple - a high-rise shrine to the Hefneresque ideal. It even featured a couple of oil paintings of Joe as rendered by a hot Playboy illustrator, LeRoy Neiman, whom Sonny had commissioned as the Jets' in-house artist. The coffee table and chandelier were glass. The leather bar and the mirrored bed were round. Joe's sheets were green satin; his wallpaper silk, his floors marble. The sofa and ottoman were brown suede. The fixtures in the john were eighteen-carat gold. A miniature Spanish galleon Namath bought in Cincinnati rested atop a French provincial cabinet. What would they think in Beaver Falls? Broadway Joe was the king of this jungle: Siberian snow leopard throw pillows, cheetah-skin bench, an easy chair and drapes in a brown-and-white jungle-cat print. And of course: the llama-skin rug. It looked like a patch of exotic marine life or furry tentacles from a cheap science fiction movie. The shaggy strands were about six inches long, deep enough for one of David Kennedy's cuff links - a gift from his father, appropriately enough - to vanish without a trace. "It's with the God of the llama rugs now," Kennedy says wistfully. Like the white shoes and the green Lincoln, the rug is recalled with great affection by men of a certain age.
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