AMERICA'S Sweetheart
STEVE GARVEY LINES UP HIS COLOGNES BY THE AMOUNT UNUSED. He arranges his Polo shirts by pastel. He'll keep vacuuming a clean carpet just to admire the parallel patterns he makes. His shirts are monogrammed. When he was a batboy, the bats rested trademarks out, knobs up, in the order of the day's starting lineup. He would save his allowance to buy Ban-Lon shirts. (He had 16 in varying colors.) He would sometimes re-iron his mother's ironing, just to get it exactly right. As a player, he would sweep the dugout steps. When he joined the San Diego Padres, he suggested a reorganization of the bat and helmet racks. Much tidier. In his closet in his pink-and-pink house in Del Mar, Calif., all the shirts are on hangers, facing left. There are no blue jeans. On the floor, the shoes are treed and the toes all point outward. Muss his hair, go to jail. You can bounce a quarter off his bed.
So how come his life is such a mess?
For most of his nearly 41 years Garvey lived at the corner of Straight and Narrow. He played football at Michigan State. Graduated with a B average. Signed with his boyhood idols, the Dodgers. Married the prettiest girl in school and had two daughters Norman Rockwell might have painted. Was a 10-time All-Star. Played in five World Series and 1,207 straight games, the National League record for reliability. And when the Dodgers said he was too old, he took his button-down swing and won the Padres a pennant. And when he retired last year, he was crouched and ready for life after baseball. He owned a business. His main office was a $15,000-a-month layout on La Jolla Village Drive. In compulsorily hip Southern California, he was hopelessly square:-jawed,-shouldered,-dealing and-thinking.
Tom Lasorda, who coached and managed Garvey for 10 years on the Dodgers and two in the minors, once said, "If he ever came to date my daughter, I'd lock the door and not let him out." Garvey signed autographs until his smile ached. When he lived in Calabasas, outside L.A., he welcomed the kids who came to his house for autographs, one time with a plate of cookies. He was involved in more charities than any carpool of Dodgers. The Multiple Sclerosis Society, Special Olympics and the Starlight Foundation each gave him awards for distinguished service. Lindsay, Calif., named a junior high school after him, trading in Abraham Lincoln. Once, on Nun's Day at Dodger Stadium, a quadriplegic child asked him to get a hit for her. He got five, and knocked in five runs and scored five times. He was headed for Cooperstown and probably Washington. He was a role model's role model, a dinosaur somebody uncrated from the 1950s and couldn't get back in the box. "I try to walk around as if a little boy or a little girl was following me," he once said.
Well, boys and girls, stick this in your lunchboxes: Garvey currently is on one side or the other of four lawsuits, having settled two others since Oct. 6. He keeps at least five lawyers in suspenders. In the space of eight months, he had affairs with three women at once, impregnated two and married a fourth. A judge jailed his former wife for contempt of court for not letting him see his kids, and a psychiatrist testified that the kids, who say they don't want to see Garvey, are suffering from "parental alienation syndrome." He's up to his chiseled chin in debt, into the scary seven figures. Two former business associates have sued him. Other than that, it has been all apple pie and porch swings.
"Some people have a mid-life crisis," he says. "I had a midlife disaster."
The one thing you didn't want to see when you were 10-year-old Steve Garvey was the porch light on and your mother's car in the driveway. That meant your invalid grandmother had needed help and you hadn't tended to her, and now you were in trouble. A whack would be forthcoming.
He called her Nanny, and she lived with the Garvey family in Tampa. A tire had flown off a truck years before and knocked her down from behind, leaving both her arms paralyzed. Nanny was good-hearted, but she needed help. And since Steve's mother, Millie, worked all day in an insurance office and his dad, Joe, was a bus driver and Steve was an only child, there was nobody around to help her but him. So Steve would get home from school, clean the house, start dinner and even help her go to the bathroom. How was she going to do it? She couldn't lift her skirt very well and, of course, she couldn't wipe, so he did it for her.
Says Garvey, "I remember the first time, kind of looking at her and saying to her. 'Do you want me to help you?' and her saying, 'Would you, please?' You didn't have to say too many words after that. You got over the embarrassment."
When a kid grows up with responsibilities like that, he grows up fast. And his parents kept a strict house, one where you said "yessir" and "no ma'am" and pulled your weight and then some. He had to play near the house, to keep the porch light in view, so he learned how to be alone. He would play make-believe baseball games—tossing up small grapefruits from the trees next door and hitting them—between his beloved Dodgers and the Yankees. And if the Dodgers lost, then they lost. None of this "Wait a minute, ladies and gentlemen, the umpire has changed his mind!" He would make himself run sprints as punishment for the Dodgers' losing.
Punishment was important. Punishment was necessary. "Mom would slap me, but that's what I needed," he says. She was nothing if not demanding, and you did things her way. One time he gave her a dirty look, and his burly 6'2" father hit him hard across the face. Never, ever, show disrespect to your mother. To your grandmother. To women. And so he strove to please everyone. His room was museum-neat. He went to church more often than his parents did; he even went to week-day masses. He was an elementary school crossing guard.
And so what you had was a 10-year-old going on 28, a short kid with amazingly wide shoulders. "I had more responsibilities than two and three kids," he says. And so he became different. If he broke a window playing baseball, he wouldn't make like Carl Lewis and dash. He would march right up to the house and begin arranging a payment plan.
"I can't remember Steve ever giving us any trouble, ever," says his father. Garvey never wore his hair over his ears. Never rebelled. He was 19 years old in tie-dyed 1968, wearing color-coordinated Hagar slacks and monogrammed sweaters. He hated to dance, because dancing in the late '60s was about losing control. His dormitory room at Michigan State was so neat it made the eyes of a resident adviser mist. He says he was a virgin until college. "I guess I just wasn't the kind of guy that liked to fog up the back windows," he says. "I had important things I wanted to do."
Even Garvey's games were controlled. "Controlled aggression," as he used to put it. His was a most mechanical swing, not fluid like Will Clark's, but purposeful and driving. He stood like a statue, with his head high, chin forward and Pop-eye arms held away from his body. One writer said he ran as though not to wrinkle his shirt. In batting practice he kept track of his line drives. He was knocked down six times in 1980 and six times he got back up and got hits. He kept track.
Such was his dedication that during his remarkable consecutive game streak, he played at various times with a hyperextended elbow, 22 stitches in his chin,, a pulled hamstring, a bruised heel, a migraine, the flu, a 103° fever and a toenail so impacted they had to drill a hole in it to relieve the pressure. Garvey felt a responsibility to be there, every day, for the fans. This is a man who played an entire season at first base without an error. Emotions won't get you to 200 hits.
He would not cut loose. And around professional athletes, that immediately made him a flake. Or suspect. He once caught some of his Dodger teammates giving each other high fives when he got thrown out trying to bunt. One Dodger was quoted as saying, "You know what? Steve Garvey doesn't have a friend on this team." He and Don Sutton once brawled on the clubhouse floor.
But how could Garvey be one of the guys? He couldn't act young, like his teammates. This is a man who calls waitresses by their name tags. He rode on the coaches' bus, not the players'. He wasn't good at leering at women and cutting up with the boys. Wouldn't be responsible. Besides, one hotfoot could mess up a perfectly good pair of shoelaces. "I just never liked to sit in the back of the plane and see who could throw up into a trash can, that's all." he says.
And so went the rest of his life, too. At 22 he married Cynthia Truhan, a prospective medical-school student, who dropped that ambition to be at Steve's side as he pursued his baseball career. The two of them had few friends among his teammates and their wives. Steve was more comfortable around people like Lasorda, his elder by 21 years. Why bother cultivating friendships with his contemporaries? He had mail to answer, business contacts to cement, a moral obligation to be at every Cub Scout banquet and Kiwanis dinner.
He believed in doing the Right Thing. His parents smoked, but he never did. His teammates swore, but he never did. Cyndy says that when he was having trouble throwing in his first years as a Dodger, people would call and scream insults at him. He would listen to everything they had to say and then hang up. Punishment is important. Yet in 1983, when he broke the National League record for consecutive games, he took a $ 15,000 ad in the Los Angeles Times to thank the fans.
But maybe sometimes he has confused responsibility to family with responsibility to fans. Recently he sat outside a Los Angeles courtroom where his visitation rights suit was being heard, happily signing autographs. Cyndy says he once sent his daughter Whitney a birthday card that read, "Happy Birthday, Best Wishes from Steve Garvey." He can be crying and the level of his voice doesn't change. Once he apologized to his daughters with tears in his eyes for having lied about his love life. Later Krisha, the elder of the two, testified in court that "he didn't seem sincere."
As the marriage went on, it became obvious that to find two people more opposite than Cyndy and Steve would take six episodes of Love Connection. The guy Cyndy left Garvey for was composer Marvin Hamlisch. Go figure.
Steve was Lake Placid. Cyndy was Fire Island. He ignores slights. She fights back. When she tried to have a conversation with him, he often remained silent. So she was subconsciously driven to doing more and more outrageous things to try to squeeze a reaction out of him. Boy, did she try.
Says Steve, when Cyndy found out she was pregnant with their second daughter only a year after the first was born, she picked up a knife from a kitchen counter and came at him with it. "Never happened," says Cyndy. Says Steve, "All I know is she took six steps towards me, and I was up the stairs in three."
The one time Hamlisch came to their house, he and Steve went into the den and two hours later, Cyndy was Hamlisch's. "He gave me away," Cyndy says. "Unbelievable!" Says Steve, "It felt like a big relief to me." Cyndy claims that Hamlisch later said, "You know, I've won a Tony, a Pulitzer and an Academy Award, but that was the easiest prize I ever won." Cyndy took the kids and left for New York.
At one point, when Cyndy had come back to Los Angeles, she discovered an appointment book at Steve's office containing entries made by his secretary, Judy Ross. The entries said things like "Steve and me in San Francisco" and "Steve and me skiing." Slightly miffed, Cyndy picked up a baseball bat and started getting good wood on the walls, pictures, vases and clocks. "She was in there with the baseball bat and a pair of scissors," says Ross. "When she left, the scissors were stuck in my appointment book."
What has transpired since then is a venomous dispute between Steve and Cyndy in which their two daughters, now 13 and 15, have been the main victims. Once, Garvey says, Cyndy called him in Houston and left the message: "Tell him Krisha's been run over by a truck." Cyndy now says someone, not she, must have been playing a joke, but Garvey wasn't laughing then. He spent the next two hours frantically calling hospitals near their home.
The girls did not appear at the Padres' Steve Garvey Night on April 16, 1988. Cyndy says they didn't want to "ride around in a convertible." She refused to let the kids see him in San Diego as long as he was living with Ross. When Garvey and his parents showed up at the girls' T-ball game, Cyndy admits she shoved Millie Garvey. "I was getting my kids' lunch ready," Cyndy says. "And she spit on me."
Once Cyndy arrived at a Dodger Stadium luncheon honoring Garvey's mother and screamed obscenities at Steve for 20 minutes in front of club officials and reporters. She left only after security guards were summoned.
This year Cyndy, now Cynthia Truhan again, published The Secret Life of Cyndy Garvey, written with Andy Meisler, in which she details a childhood of verbal and physical abuse by her father and takes a Cuisinart to Steve's halo:
•She wrote that Garvey mimicked her migraine headache symptoms to get out of the Army. Steve now says he had migraines off and on until he was 35 and "there's no way you can memorize them [the symptoms]. I may have asked her about them, wondering if I had the same thing she did." Even if the migraines were real, letters Garvey wrote to Cyndy in late 1970 from Fort Jackson, S.C., where he was stationed for basic training, do appear to support Cyndy's contention that Garvey was angling for a medical discharge. In one of the letters, he said, "Well, plan 'escape' is being plotted in the SPG 'Brain' center and it looks good! If I could get five good letters I think it will work!" Another letter said, "I also got to Dr. Woods and he is sending a letter for me concerning the mig. headaches. He said he would take care of me so let's hope so."
•She wrote that while at Michigan State she would take tests and write papers for Steve, who was supposed to do the work by correspondence while he was away, playing minor league ball. Steve denies it.
•She wrote that Steve became the National League All-Star first baseman in 1974 as the result of a write-in campaign in which he, she and a few family friends spent weeks filling ballots for him. Steve denies it. "I think he was voted in by the people," says Cyndy's brother, Chris, who was there. "But we are some of the people who helped him out."
On the Oprah-Phil-Larry tour for her book, Cyndy described her former husband as, randomly, a sociopath, a pathological liar, fraudulent, immoral, dishonest, cold, aloof and asexual. (Asexual?) Yet she still has his love letters.
Cyndy has become so enraged at Steve that at various times she has kicked a dent in his car, ripped his shirt, slapped his face and slapped his accountant's face. Cyndy denies only the last. She said on Donahue that she hadn't received a dime of child support or alimony. Steve forthwith produced canceled checks. She wrote in her book that Steve had been ordered by the court to undergo psychiatric counseling. Actually, the court ordered Steve and the two daughters to go through the standard evaluation process in a visitation-rights case. "My ex-wife has one purpose in life," says Garvey. "To bring her ex-husband down."
Be that as it may, events of the fall and winter of 1988-89 showed that Garvey was doing a pretty good job of it himself.
Bumper sticker: HONK IF YOU'RE CARRYING STEVE GARVEY'S BABY. Bob Hope: "I haven't seen so many gorgeous girls since I spent Father's Day with Steve Garvey." Letter in the L.A. Times: "It's been a long time since Steve Garvey went two for two." T-shirt: STEVE GARVEY IS NOT MY PADRE.
Once in a while even Garvey will laugh at it all. One day, after hugging a woman, he said to her, "Uh-oh, that was a long one. You're going to have twins."
Not that it has been a lot of laughs for the women involved, or, for that matter, for him. It probably has ruined his prospects for the political career he was hoping to have. As a result of the revelations about his sex life, he lost a cable TV base-ball-for-kids show to Reggie Jackson, and he resigned his position on the board of trustees at the University of San Diego, a Catholic school, after the local bishop called him a sociopath. There were so many jokes about him on this year's Academy Awards show that his daughters turned off the TV. And when ads bearing his picture began appearing on the sides of San Diego buses, plugging his morning radio talk show, somebody wrote "Creep" across his face on one of them.
Steve Garvey? Creep?
•August 1987: Garvey, who has been involved for a year with 5'4", doe-eyed, Atlanta-based CNN assignment editor Rebecka Mendenhall, gets serious. But he doesn't get around to mentioning Mendenhall to longtime girlfriend Ross. Or Ross to Mendenhall. Ross says, "I'd pick him up at the airport and say, 'I thought you were coming in from Dallas." And he'd say, 'Oh, no, we had to go to Atlanta to meet with Coke.' "
Who wouldn't believe a man as romantic as Garvey? He would find out what a woman's favorite song was, frame the sheet music and give it to her. If it was her 34th birthday, he would send 34 roses. He wrote love poems. Margo Adams told Penthouse that Garvey was a nicer guy and a better lover than Wade Boggs. He took his women to the La Jolla Polo shop and outfitted them in his favorite clothes. When Mendenhall was hospitalized last July, he slept in the lounge chair next to the bed, holding her hand. He may have been a rake, but he was their rake.
•January 1988: Garvey, who became a free agent when the Padres refused to resign him after the '87 season, retires from baseball. He subsequently campaigns unsuccessfully to become president of the team.
•July 1988: Garvey finds out that San Diego medical products sales representative Cheryl Ann Moulton is pregnant with his child. They had been dating for six months. "The first date was much more fun than I thought it would be, so we went out again," says Garvey. "And then four or five other times we never left her apartment.
"I was led to believe she was taking responsibility for birth control. If you want to become pregnant, you just don't use whatever you're using. I have to feel that she probably did [want to become pregnant]."
Even though a DNA test last winter proved that Garvey was the father of Moulton's baby, he waited until last month, when a San Diego Superior Court ordered him to make child-support payments, to begin helping her out. Garvey has expressed no interest in seeing his now nine-month-old daughter, and Moulton has refused comment.
•August 1988: Garvey convinces Ross, who has found out about Mendenhall, that it's nothing serious. He juggles the two of them deftly. At 8 p.m., San Diego time, he would call Mendenhall in Atlanta and tuck her in. "Then he'd spend the night at my house," says Ross.
•Nov. 25, 1988: Garvey gets down on one knee and says to Mendenhall, "Darling, will you marry me?" Mendenhall doesn't have to answer; her kisses do. Not that he wants to marry her. of course. "She gave me an ultimatum. I thought I would grow into loving her," he says.
They decide to get married on April 1. "There's some irony in that, isn't there?" says Mendenhall. (More irony. Mendenhall gave birth to a son on Friday, Oct. 13.)
•Christmas 1988: Four women in Garvey's life—Ross, Mendenhall, Krisha and Whitney—all get the same gift: gold pins from Tiffany's in the shape of three X's—for kisses. "How was I supposed to know they'd all gang up and compare notes?" Garvey says.
•New Year's Day. 1989: On the way to his ski condo in Deer Valley, Utah, he tells Krisha and Whitney that he's engaged to Mendenhall. When Krisha calls Cyndy to tell her, Cyndy begins screaming. Mendenhall, who was with Steve when Krisha called, says Cyndy was upset because Steve was taking on new obligations while he still owed her $25,000.
•Jan. 3. 1989: Garvey puts Mendenhall on a plane to Atlanta and then, according to Ross, tells Ross that he has broken up with Mendenhall. Says Ross. "He told me, 'You're the one I see myself married to.' "
•Jan. 4, 1989: Garvey's engagement is announced to the press, but according to Mendenhall, Garvey had already called her to say they would have to delay the wedding. The reason: Cyndy, he said, was pressuring him to pay her $25,000 she said he owed her for legal expenses. Later the same day they talk again and this time Garvey tells Mendenhall that another woman (Moulton) has phoned him, saying she is pregnant with his child. Garvey says he told Mendenhall, "Marriage just isn't for me," and broke the engagement. According to Mendenhall, all he said was he wanted to "push the wedding back a little."
Meanwhile. Ross is growing skeptical. "He did interviews that day describing how he'd proposed to her," she says. "...I couldn't believe he could be so callous."
•Jan. 5, 1989: Mendenhall flies to San Diego because, she now says, she was worried about Moulton and the $25,000, and she wanted to comfort Garvey. Garvey says she came to talk him out of breaking up. They had sex the next night. Again, Garvey told SI, he thought she was in charge of the birth control. "She did the same things she always did," he says. "She walked into the bathroom beforehand. What am I going to do, follow her?"
Mendenhall's paternity and breach-of-promise suit against Garvey says he was "fully cognizant" that she hadn't made the usual birth control preparations. In documents prepared for a U.S. District Court in Atlanta, Garvey now says they did not have sex on Jan. 6.
•Jan. 8, 1989: Garvey puts Mendenhall on the plane for Atlanta. "We both did a lot of crying," she says. "He said to me, 'We'll be married. I just need time.' " Garvey says he broke off the engagement for good before she left. "People can listen but not hear," he says.
•Jan. 13, 1989: At his annual Ski Classic in Deer Valley—to benefit the Utah Special Olympics—Garvey falls in love with blonde, blue-green-eyed, 30-year-old Candace Thomas, a former high school cheerleader. Over the next two weeks, they dance together at the Bush Inauguration, take in the Super Bowl and become engaged the night of the game. Thomas has been divorced twice, and her daughters from the first marriage now live with her and Garvey.
•Jan. 23, 1989: Mendenhall, having heard nothing from Garvey for 13 days, thinks she has worried herself sick. She has lost nine pounds and can't sleep. No wonder. She's pregnant.
Garvey and Mendenhall talk. She says that's when he broke off the engagement. Both agree he said he would take care of the baby.
•Jan. 24, 1989: Garvey calls Ross and tells her about Thomas. "He wanted me to be happy for him." says Ross. "Can you believe it?...I don't know how he dealt with all of us in the course of a year. The man's got great stamina."
And when the whole gloppy mess goes public, his daughters are so humiliated they refuse to see him, according to Cyndy. Steve contends that she had brainwashed them.
At least 60 times in 1989, according to a suit Steve filed against Cyndy. he was supposed to meet with his daughters as part of the custody agreement and wasn't able to because Cyndy had impeded him. For the court-ordered counseling sessions, for instance, he would drive two hours from San Diego to Los Angeles, wait around for an hour, then drive back home. There he was behind the wheel of the $50,000 Mercedes the Padres had given him on Steve Garvey Night, driving down the dark freeway, Mr. Control, crying.
And if you think those drives were bad, you should have been with him on Sept. 15, after what he heard in Department No. 9 of the Superior Court for Los Angeles County. That's where lawyers questioned his daughter, Krisha:
Q: Do you want to see your father?
A: I don't want to see him.
Q: Are you willing to?
A: No....
Q: Do you love your father?
A: No.
Q: Did you ever love your father?
A: When I was little.
After testifying for 90 minutes, she walked, head held high, over to where her mother sat at the defendant's table, put her head on Cyndy's shoulder and sobbed. Two weeks later the court ruled in Steve's favor, declaring Cyndy in contempt for violating a court order that gave Steve the right to see Krisha and Whitney. Cyndy was in handcuffs as she was led off to serve the first five days of a 130-day sentence. Now this was getting ridiculous. The hostess of the cable show, Motherworks, headed for the slammer? She was freed a day later, after her lawyers obtained a stay of execution, and on Nov. 1 the remainder of her sentence was suspended pending her compliance with the court's visitation order.
"He thinks he's won," Cyndy says. "But he has lost everything."
Not that there was much left to lose. After 17 years in major league baseball, Garvey says he is broke. The $10 million or so that he earned as a player is nowhere to be found, and he owes the government more than $500,000 in back taxes. His sports marketing firm, Garvey Marketing Group (GMG), which until recently had space in a San Diego office complex, now operates out of his home. He owes his former landlord $172,000 in rent. He has sold his white BMW and his Deer Valley condominium, and he has cashed in two life insurance policies to pay bills. He makes $9,300 a month as host of the radio talk show, but he owes more than half that amount in monthly child support and alimony payments.
For several years GMG has been in the business of staging charity sports events under the tax-exempt umbrella of the Steve Garvey Foundation. Tax forms filed by the foundation with the California attorney general's Registry of Charitable Trusts for the years ending Jan. 31, 1987, '88 and '89 reveal some remarkably unsuccessful fund-raising. For instance, at the '87 Steve Garvey Celebrity Ski Classic in Deer Valley, an auction was held to benefit Utah Special Olympics. Several big-ticket items—two pairs of American Airline tickets to anywhere, Rossignol skis, Fila skiwear, and several weekends at the Stein Eriksen Lodge in Deer Valley, all of them donated—were sold to the highest bidders. The total revenue from the auction, as reported to the IRS on the foundation's Form 990 for the period from Feb. 1, 1986, to Jan. 31. 1987, was $4,315. After expenses of $3,119 had been deducted, all that was left was $1,196.
"Utah Special Olympics ran the auction and kept the money," says Jim Harper, who is Garvey's accountant and the chief financial officer of the Steve Garvey Foundation. "The revenue [reported) didn't include income from the auction." Nevertheless, line 9a of Part I of the foundation's Form 990 says, alongside Gross Revenue, "AUCTION $4,315" plain as day. Jim Murphy, executive director of Utah Special Olympics from 1984 to '87, who helped supervise the auction, says, "The majority of people wrote checks to the Steve Garvey Foundation.... For the most part all the money went through their books."
Between Jan. 1, 1987, and Jan. 31,'88, GMG organized five charity events—two celebrity golf tournaments, two celebrity ski events and a party/golf extravaganza at Super Bowl XXII in San Diego. The total amount of money raised by all these events, according again to the foundation's Form 990, was $174,790. The expenses incurred in raising that money were $150,076. That left net proceeds of $24,714, of which $13,763 had been donated to charities by the end of '88. "I've seen more money raised [for charity] at backyard carnivals," said a former Garvey associate.
What Garvey has become in the American hurly-burly is everything he never wanted to be: a divorced husband, an unloved father, an unadmired teammate, a sinning Christian, a lying man of honor, a failed businessman, a control freak out of control. Not very responsible. Not very tidy.
Maybe somewhere along the line Garvey figured out that 1950s ethics don't make it in '80s America. Maybe trying to stay above it all isn't worth it. Maybe nobody's wings are that strong. Or maybe it's just that nobody trusts a baseball player with a uniform that clean.
Says Garvey, "I guess I make people mad. There's an inherent skepticism in the world.... I was an idealist. I thought. 'I'll go out and help everyone. Why wouldn't they like me?' When I signed with the Dodgers, I was sure that was the only team I'd ever play for. When I got married, I was sure it would be to one woman the rest of my life...."
Or maybe what happened is that they took Garvey's childhood away before he was done with it. Maybe it is too much to care for an invalid and go to school and do your chores and keep your room surgically clean and watch what faces you make and be 10 years old all at the same time. And maybe when you're forced to be that responsible on the outside, you resent it, and you become someone else on the inside.
Maybe we have found Steve Garvey out, and maybe it's best this way. Maybe, for better or worse, he can be himself now. The porch light is out for good.
FIVE ILLUSTRATIONS
PHOTO
DAVID STRICK/ONYX
PHOTO
TONY KORODY/SYGMA
Garvey and beautiful women find each other irresistible: Truhan (left) married and divorced him; Mendenhall (right) recently bore a child she says is his; former secretary Ross (middle right) had an eight-year affair with him; and the twice-divorced Thomas (far right) became the second Mrs. G. in February.
PHOTO
RON GALELLA
[See caption above.]
PHOTO
JANICE GORDON/SAN DIEGO TRIBUNE
[See caption above.]
PHOTO
AP
[See caption above.]
PHOTO
JAMES ARONOVSKY/PICTURE GROUP
Garvey (left) took his former wife, Cyndy, to court in Los Angeles for interfering with his legal right to visit their two daughters. Having won his suit, he saw her sentenced (above) to jail for contempt of court and led away in handcuffs. She was out the next day, and her sentence was later suspended.
PHOTO
SMEAL/GALELLA, LTD.
[See caption above.]
TWO PHOTOS
MARTIN MANN
Enduring a smooch from a pooch was a small price to pay for the kind of celebrity that made Garvey, even in short pants, a popular emcee on the charity show circuit. Now, with his good-guy image badly tarnished, Garvey is taking it on his famous chin from cartoonists (below) and assorted other wits.
ILLUSTRATION
J.D. CROWE/SAN DIEGO TRIBUNE/COPLEY NEWS SERVICE
PHOTO
RON GALELLA
Hamlisch (left) and Steve talked things over in private for two hours, and when their discussion was finished, Cyndy was Marvin's. "He gave me away!" she said.
PHOTO
RON GALELLA
When Whitney, 13 (left), and Krisha, 15, shown here at a fashion show with their mother, refused to see their father, he charged that they had been brainwashed.
PHOTO
MARTIN MANN
When your life has become a mine field and your future has gone up in smoke, the occasional exploding golf ball is nothing more than a little comic relief.