VERO BEACH, Fla. —
Fay Vincent likes to tell
the story of when he
was working in the oil
fields of Odessa, Texas, for former president George Bush. A drunk left his pickup truck crossways on a dark road, and Vincent slammed into it. A doctor came out, took a look at his cut face and said, “Ordinarily, I’d take stitches, but with you it won’t make any difference.” The story is Vincent’s self-effacing way of letting you know that he got to his beautiful seaside house in Vero Beach through brains rather than good looks, hard work rather than charisma.
The brains and hard work took him to Hollywood, where he was president of Columbia Pictures, and eventually to the office of the Commissioner of Baseball—the dream job for a baseball-crazy kid from New Haven, Conn., whose father was an excellent semi-pro player.
That family passion is paid tribute in Vincent’s new book, The Only Game in Town, a collection of interviews with great and not-so-great players of previous generations.
Baseball wasn’t just a pastime for the Vincents, it was the family religion. In the late 1940 s, the Red Sox were on the radio, but the family actually had a TV, a Du-Mont, that was “about the size of a breadbox,” Vincent remembers. His father had won it in a raffle at a Catholic church in New Haven. None of that mattered. What mattered was that it picked up Yankees games.
This meant that Vincent caught the virus spread by Joe DiMaggio and Phil Rizzuto, and Boston’s Ted Williams. This was a time when you didn’t just compete with the other neighborhood kids to see who could most accurately imitate a favorite batting stance, you memorized statistics. You dreamed about ballplayers.
After high school, and a summer as a roughneck in the Texas oil fields, Vincent dutifully followed in his father’s footsteps, which meant going to Yale, and more important, playing baseball. But in his freshman year, in a bit of childish horseplay, he fell 40 feet from a roof. On the way down, he hit a steel railing and broke his back. It proved to be a critical but not crucial injury. A surgeon took some bone from his hip and reconstructed two missing vertebrae.
But becoming a top athlete was out of the question. “In some ways, the injury was harder for my father to accept,” Vincent says. Vincent simply recalibrated and committed to academics rather than athletics. He went to Yale law, joined a firm out of college and figured he’d be a lawyer the rest of his life. He specialized in securities law, which he says is “a dull kind of law, but it wasn’t dull to me. I loved it.”
A CALL FROM HOLLYWOOD From there, he went to the Securities and Exchange Commission, where he was the associate director of the Division of Corporate Finance. He was perfectly content until one day in 1978, when his old friend Herbert Allen called him to take over Columbia Pictures. The studio was awash in a check-forgery scandal involving outgoing president David Begelman, and financier Allen, the major stockholder, wanted Vincent to bring his reputation for square dealing to Hollywood. Allen tried to tell him what he was in for. “They are chameleons. They will adjust to you, and when you close the door, they will become somebody else.” Truer words were never spoken. Vincent always wore a jacket and tie to the office, and magically, people who had never worn ties in their lives started wearing them, too. “Hollywood is a real world that creates fantasy,” he says. “It’s a unique business. Herbert wanted someone he could trust, someone who was predictable. Columbia was a mess, not a big mess, but a lot of petty, small-time corruption. Three years later, Coca-Cola bought us and we all made a lot of money and the shareholders made a lot of money too.”
SUCCESS AND DISASTER The successes of those years included Tootsie, Kramer vs. Kramer, and Gandhi: The disaster that nearly obliterated everything was a desert comedy starring Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty. Some failures are predictable, but Ishtar looked like a sure thing. Hoffman and Beatty were bankable stars, and writer / director Elaine May was one of the funniest women in show business.
But, as they say on Wall Street, past performance is no indication of future results. Vincent recalls:
“Halfway through the movie, Warren came to me and said, ‘We have a big problem. Actually, you have a big problem. Elaine can’t direct. ’”
“You’re the producer. Fire her.”
“I can’t. I’m a liberal Democrat, a progressive on women’s issues. I can’t fire her. But she can’t direct at all.”
“Well, then, I’ll fire her.”
“Then Dustin and I will walk off the picture.”
It was at this point that Vincent had a sensation of disappearing down Alice’s rabbit-hole. This is how Beatty proposed to finesse the mess: He said they would do two versions of each shot—May’s and Beatty’s. In the cutting room, where Beatty had the power, he would simply throw May’s footage out.
“So we’re paying for two movies and only getting one ?” asked Vincent. And that’s pretty much what happened.
THE SHARKS CIRCLE Ishtar was a legendary disaster, costing $ 45 million in 1987 dollars and losing, Vincent says, about $ 40 million. “It was bloated, and the sharks were circling. Everybody knew in advance they were going to hate it. It hurt me. Ray Stark went after me, and the people at Coke went after me politically.” Stark, a brilliant ex-agent-turnedproducer (Funny Girl, Funny Lady ) who was close to Herbert Allen, had ironically been a friend and early supporter of Vincent. “Ray was talented, very bright and, at first, was there to help me,” says Vincent. “He was very cultured, charming when he wanted to be. And he was fundamentally amoral. Women were the least of it. He was manipulative, and a no-holds-barred infighter. He could be vicious.
“ Ray could not distinguish between me making a judgment for the company and me being his friend. He wanted to do a sequel to Annie, a film that hadn’t come close to breaking even. I said it was impossible, that nobody had ever made a sequel to an unsuccessful original. It got ugly.”
Actually, Vincent thinks a blunder at least as catastrophic as the making of Ishtar was not making a Steven Spielberg script that was, at the time, called E. T. and Me. (Columbia chairman and CEO ) Frank Price and his boy genius Marvin Antonowsky did research and they let it go. They thought “Starman would be bigger. True story.”
Perhaps the core problem was that Vincent was a Hollywood outsider, which meant that it was easy to blame him for everything that went wrong. The biggest personal mistake he will cop to was hiring Chariots of Fire producer David Puttnam to run production at Columbia. “He couldn’t separate his movies from his politics; he was a moralist and he had terrific problems dealing with authority.”
BASEBALL CALLS Soon after the Ishtar imbroglio, it became clear that Vincent was not going to be the next CEO of Coca-Cola, so he left Columbia. Providentially, Vincent’s friend, Yale president A. Bartlett Giamatti, was being hired as the next Commissioner of Baseball and he asked Vincent to draft his contract. Then he asked Vincent to go with him as vice commissioner. It wasn’t in Vincent’s plan, but then neither was going to Hollywood for 10 years.
“I had plenty of money, and I thought I’d write. But I loved Bart. I thought we’d be there four or five years. It didn’t turn out the way we wished in a lot of respects.”
That’s for sure. Giamatti’s first and, tragically, only order of business was the Pete Rose gambling mess, which ended with him banning Rose from baseball.
Then, after only five months on the job, Giamatti dropped dead of a heart attack, and Vincent was named commissioner.
“He was very easy to work for,” remembers Len Coleman, who was hired by Vincent in 1991 and went on to become president of the National League for five years. “He delegates, doesn’t stand over you to make sure things get done. If there’s a meeting at 4 p. m., he’s there at a quarter to four—Lombardi time. Fay’s a Renaissance man, wellspoken on any number of subjects, and he’s also a man of great integrity. He truly loves the game. “ Fay is odd in that he’s not shy in a business or social sense, but he’s shy about taking credit. For instance, he was the first commissioner to recognize the need for a more prominent role for African-Americans in baseball’s corporate offices, and went out of his way to hire people like me, Jimmy Lee Solomon and Al Williams. He extended health care benefits to men who played in the Negro Leagues. But he doesn’t talk about doing those things.”
For a man with Vincent’s emotional connection to baseball, this was a momentous gift, complicated by the grim fact that only his close friend’s death had made it possible.
But still: Now he became friends with men named DiMaggio and Williams, the idols of his youth, and was able to talk with them as an equal. Now he was able to have box seats for the World Series and walk onto the grass at Wrigley Field or Fenway Park and there was enough small boy inside Vincent for him to realize that it felt wrong somehow; that any second the security people would chase him off the field where he didn’t belong.
DiMaggio and he became friendly. “With DiMaggio, all the great questions were long-simmering and he went to his grave with many of them unanswered,” Vincent noted.
DiMaggio had something approaching complete recall of every at-bat, every play, and he was still keeping score. When Vincent once asked him to accompany him to a baseball game so the first President Bush could give DiMaggio an award, DiMaggio asked, “Do you want me to come, Commissioner ? Is it personal to you ?” Vincent realized that DiMaggio was going to do this as a favor, and there might come a time when he would want the favor returned. On some ultimate level, DiMaggio kept himself for himself. Williams was different—open, loud, opinionated, funny. What you saw was what you got.
But DiMaggio was a brilliant appraiser; he would have made a good general manager. Once Vincent asked him who wasn’t in the Hall of Fame that should be, and he immediately replied, “Joe Gordon [who played for the Yankees and Indians in the’ 30 s and ’ 40 s ]. Joe Gordon never made a mistake. He was a terrific hitter, but beyond that, he always did the right thing. He never made a bad throw. He never threw to the wrong base. Joe Gordon.”
A COLLISION WITH THE OWNERS After a brief honeymoon phase, Vincent found himself on a collision course with the owners, who were determined to break the players’ union by fomenting the 1994 strike. Vincent regards himself as an incrementalist, and the owners were determined to roll back 25 years of labor success by breaking the union in one fell swoop. He didn’t think it could be done. In 1992, Vincent was handed a vote of no-confidence, and he promptly resigned, just as the owners expected. He could have gone to court and served out the rest of his term, but, as he says, “I would then have to go on working with (Milwaukee owner ) Bud Selig and (Chicago owner ) Jerry Reinsdorf and (Angels owner ) Jackie Autry and (Pittsburgh owner ) Doug Danforth.”
Selig was given Vincent’s job, but, until recently, not the title. Actually, Selig is more of a Chief Owner than a Commissioner.
Steve Greenberg, the son of legendary Detroit slugger Hank Greenberg, worked for Vincent in the commissioner’s office, and he says that “the issues we had were a sign of the times as much as anything else. In the early ’ 90 s, there was a huge amount of tension in baseball because the economics weren’t good. Fay attempted to do a number of things that were unpopular at the time. A lot of those things Bud Selig was able to pull off—revenue sharing, the realignment of teams. Fay didn’t have the political capital to get it done. And ownership wasn’t ready in that period to undertake radical changes. “ Baseball is extremely conservative; when my father was a general manager at Cleveland in 1952, he proposed interleague play. Interleague play didn’t happen until about 10 years ago. In the early ’ 90 s, ownership basically thought it could win the struggle with the union and that would solve all the problems of the game.” Would Bart Giamatti have been able to avoid the buzz-saw ?
“Bart had a very different temperament than Fay,” says Greenberg. “I don’t know what battles Bart would have chosen to fight. I don’t know that Bart would have been as focused on economics as Fay was. That’s where Fay ran into trouble. He tried to effect a realignment of the dollars and how they flowed. And once you get into people’s pocketbooks, they pay attention. Bart’s focus would have been on traditions and public image of the game, and the character of the game—the on-field stuff.” Hard-core baseball people, as opposed to hard-core business people whose business happens to be baseball, have no doubts about Vincent’s tenure. THE THREE GREAT COMMISSIONERS
“There have been three great Commissioners in my time,” says Hall of Fame pitcher Bob Feller. “Bart Giamatti, Fay Vincent and Happy Chandler. These men were at the ballpark, they were fans, they knew the game. Players liked them, the fans liked them. I don’t want to talk about the worst commissioners, but I will say that Ford Frick was a club owner’s commissioner. He didn’t do a damn thing for the players and never intended to. And he’s in the Hall of Fame ! Peter Ueberroth took a hike when the Pete Rose mess broke and left it to Giamatti. Bud Selig, well, he’s doing better now than he did at first. Let’s leave it at that. But you don’t think Bud Selig would write The Only Game in Town, do you ?”
In retrospect, says Vincent, “I failed, but I did the best I could. I failed because I couldn’t convince them that they couldn’t break the players union. The owners had this collective fantasy about it, and their general attitude was that I was soft on Communism. The players union is the most successful union there is; there isn’t another one that comes close. And (former union head ) Marvin Miller isn’t in the Hall of Fame ! To get there, he needs a threefourths vote, and that’s almost impossible; the Nazarene couldn’t get a threefourths vote.”
A LITTLE LIKE SHOW BUSINESS It turned out that the business of professional baseball was a lot like show business. Looking back, Vincent feels that he left the movie business at the right time, but left baseball too soon, which is probably why he’s stayed involved.
Vincent has lived in Vero Beach for the past four years, with his wife of eight years, Christina (both have three children from a previous marriage ). The 67-year-old Vincent has divided his life into fifths: membership on corporate boards, including Time-Warner; private businesses; investments (“ I’m not very successful, but I screw around with it” ); promoting higher education; and writing. Mobility has become a problem in recent years. For decades, he could walk normally, but in middle age, arthritis of the spine set in, as well as some other related problems.
Nonetheless, he does as much as many people of his age with fewer physical problems. For example, a few years ago, Vincent and Herbert Allen formed the Baseball Oral History Foundation to fund a series of videotaped interviews with baseball players. Vincent has done about 40 of them, with The Only Game in Town as the first result; the videotapes are deposited at the Hall of Fame.
“I set out to do the Negro Leaguers and the older players first,” he says. “(Yankee infielder ) Frankie Crosetti wouldn’t do it; he was afraid his memory wasn’t good and he didn’t want to offend anybody.” Crosetti, and the elusive Dodgers pitcher Sandy Koufax, are the main people that are missing in action from Vincent’s project.
The oral histories, and the resulting book, are all a way of staying in the game that defined his family’s passion. As he puts it, “these stories keep the history of baseball alive.”
And, quite possibly, Fay Vincent as well.
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