The Machine Read Online Free PDF Page A

The newspaper said the food alone cost $8,000, which was about right, give or take a couple hundred. People would have to be impressed. The median income in America was barely more than $12,000. Johnny Bench spent $8,000 for the food at his wedding.
    Vickie Chesser wondered again how this had happened. Everything had moved so fast—too fast, her friends kept telling her. But they could not see it. Johnny was perfect. They did not know him. They had not seen the way he acted around little Phillip Buckingham.Phillip was five, all kinds of curly hair, his body ravaged by leukemia. Sick children are drawn to ballplayers, and ballplayers are drawn to sick children, and Vickie would watch as the two of them talked, soul to soul. Sometimes, when they talked, it seemed like Phillip was the adult and Johnny the child. She saw the way Phillip looked at Johnny, so full of love, so full of life. No, her friends could never understand. For the first time in her life, she was in love, really in love.
    Johnny had hoped that Bob Hope would make it in for the wedding. He knew that President Gerald Ford would not make it, not with Vietnam smoldering to its inevitable conclusion. And Johnny was not surprised when Joe DiMaggio sent his regrets. The talk show host Dinah Shore wanted to come, but she could not get away. But the singer Bobby Goldsboro was there, and John had hoped Bob Hope would make it too. They had traveled together to Vietnam to entertain the troops. There was this one time, funny story, this one time when Johnny was in the back of the plane sleeping on a bed of blankets with Tara Leigh, she was one of the Ding-A-Ling sisters, she was one of the Golddiggers, the girls who would add a little sex appeal to The Dean Martin Show on television. Beautiful girl. Anyway, they were huddled together, just trying to get some sleep, nothing untoward going on, and Bob Hope wandered back and ended up stepping on Johnny’s head. Bob told that story all the time. Got big laughs. Johnny had really hoped that Bob Hope would make the wedding, but his schedule would not allow it.
    Vickie knew that Johnny had only called her in December because he heard from a buddy that she was “one swinging lady.” Well, he had been given bad information. She didn’t swing, you know. He called her up cold, no introduction, and invited her to come with him to Las Vegas. Her first reaction was to hang up the phone, but there was something strong in his voice, something solid. He offered to send her a plane ticket and buy her a separate room. “What do you have to lose?” he asked, and there was something about that voice, something so sure, something different from all the other guys she had dated.Then he invited her to join him at a wedding. What could go wrong at a wedding?
    Johnny had told teammates after the 1974 season ended that it was time for him to get married. He was almost twenty-seven. He’d had his fun. Johnny had always lived an orderly and planned life. Before his first full season in the major leagues—that was 1968—he announced that he would win the Rookie of the Year Award. He won that. He then told reporters that he would become the best player in baseball. That happened in 1970, when he hit 40 home runs and drove in 148 runs, numbers no catcher had ever reached. And Johnny Bench wasn’t a normal catcher; he revolutionized the position. He snagged pitches one-handed. He pounced on bunts with the quickness of a snake striking. His arm was a marvel—he threw out so many base runners that by 1972 players had more or less stopped trying to steal against him. Time magazine put him on the cover that year, with the understated headline: “Baseball’s Best Catcher.” He told reporters that baseball was not big enough to hold him, that he needed to stretch out, and he did that too. He sang in nightclubs. He played a guard on the television show Mission Impossible and a waiter on The Partridge Family. He hosted his own television show and