From heights to depths. Ex-Cowboy Martin tries to tackle drug problem
By Peter Slover / Staff Writer of The DMN 1996, The DMN Published 10-20-1996
In the good old days on his top-rated radio show, he was Beautiful Harvey Martin
Somehow, the unlikely tag fit: He was an All-Pro Dallas Cowboy, the high-rolling toast of the town, restaurateur and raconteur, a bona-fide hometown hero.
But when the spotlight returned this year, it glared upon a different, not-so-beautiful sight: In court, Harvey Martin has admitted to domestic violence and cocaine use and has been ordered into a Dallas County drug-treatment center.
"It may be the first time in his life that somebody has said to Harvey Martin, `This is not about the Cowboys, this is not about your celebrity,"' said his attorney, Randall B. Isenberg. "This is about whether or not you're going to be a street person - a penitentiary person - or whether you're going to reclaim your life."
Unable to accept outside phone calls or visitors, Mr. Martin, 45, declined to answer written questions mailed to the rehabilitation center, but offered to be interviewed once he was allowed outside contact.
In a subsequent letter, he said an interview would have to wait until he finishes therapy.
"I am in treatment to help myself change my behavior," he wrote. "At this moment my treatment is all-important to me."
In court and to friends, Mr. Martin has now admitted the rumors he's always denied: He has long had a big drug problem, even during the height of his playing career.
And with the truth on the table, Mr. Martin's friends are talking, too, expressing their hope that he will turn things around.
"I've smoked crack cocaine with Harvey," said Thomas "Hollywood" Henderson, Mr. Martin's former teammate and a recovering addict who's been sober for nearly 13 years. "Harvey has been using cocaine since the 1970s, more than 20 years, and it's not surprising he's hitting bottom.
"His family, his friends, his employers, his girlfriends, his associates, the police - nobody stopped him. Maybe nobody could."
Mr. Martin and his younger sister, Mary, grew up in a churchgoing Oak Cliff family. His stepfather drove a truck, and his mother cleaned houses, sold encyclopedias and worked as a cashier at a high school cafeteria.
Mr. Martin was a big, bashful boy, he recalled in his 1986 autobiography, Texas Thunder, My Eleven Years With the Dallas Cowboys. He had no intention of trying out for high school football, the story goes, until the summer before his junior year, when he heard his stepfather complaining after a round of golf.
"All the guys at the club are bragging about their boys being on the football team," Mr. Martin recounted his stepfather saying. "I can never brag about my boy."
Crushed, Mr. Martin went out for football, won a scholarship to East Texas State University in Commerce and was the Cowboys' third-round draft choice in 1973.
Mr. Martin had to learn the on-field meanness that marked his 11 years as a defensive end and the team's all-time sack leader.
"He made himself a football player," recalled Cowboys receiver Drew Pearson, Mr. Martin's training-camp roommate. "He was a big guy, a good player, but he was too nice. He got tired of the coach dogging him, and one day in practice he just changed."
His rookie year, Mr. Martin met the woman who would be his girlfriend during much of the 1970s.
In his book, Mr. Martin - who has never married - described his fascination with Sharon Bell, now a clinical social worker in her native San Francisco.
"This beautiful black woman possessed all the poise and culture I lacked," he wrote. "She explained restaurant menus to me, and wine selections, and introduced me to symphonies and live theatrical productions."
For her part, Ms. Bell said recently, she didn't care about football: She fell in love with a guileless, earnest, big-hearted man.
"He was very sweet, very kind, sort of a calm person. What I admired was a person who was determined to be the best," she said. "If that meant staying up all night looking at films, he did it. If that meant taking speech lessons, he did it."
Always, she said, Mr. Martin relished the trappings of success: the attention, the fancy cars, the mansion with the indoor pool. At one point, Ms. Bell recalled, her image-conscious beau had his jaw wired shut for weeks, as part of a painful surgery to correct what he felt was an unsightly protrusion of the lower jaw.
On the field, the 6-foot-5, 265-pound pass rusher was a four-time Pro Bowl choice and a unanimous All-Pro in 1977, the season he won co-honors as Most Valuable Player in Super Bowl XII.
Mr. Martin's local fame was driven home early to then-Pittsburgh Steeler Dwight White, who played at Dallas' Madison High School and was Mr. Martin's college roommate.
"There was this billboard that Oak Farms Dairy had on Central Expressway, with famous people drinking milk. I looked up and there was Harvey," said Mr. White, now a Pittsburgh investment banker. "He was as big as you could get."
Mr. Martin was a tireless public-relations machine. There were charity events and promotional galas, autograph signings and volunteer work, his weekday-morning radio show on KRLD-AM (1080), even stints as an off-season television sportscaster for KXAS-TV (Channel 5).
With his easy smile and grizzly-bear handshake, Mr. Martin shook off failed business ventures, tax troubles, a 1982 bankruptcy and persistent drug rumors.
Mr. Pearson was a partner with Mr. Martin in some early business flops before going on to a successful sports marketing career.
He said Mr. Martin never learned to regard his public persona as an asset, to be carefully cultivated, not just cashed in on.
"You can't just lend your name. You have to be there, be involved," Mr. Pearson said. "My early failures were because I wasn't there."
Salaries weren't generally disclosed, but in the early days Mr. Martin sold shoes to supplement his off-season income. By 1978, he was the highest-paid Cowboys lineman - at $125,000 a year.
The money was enough to make a naive youngster feel like a big-shot investor, former players said, attracting all manner of hustlers and leeches.
"Like a lot of us, he wanted to set something up to provide for life after football," Mr. Pearson said. "He took bad risks. We were good football players. That didn't mean we were good businessmen."
The drug rumors came to a head in January 1983, when Danny Stone, a barber and accused drug dealer, testified in a federal drug trial that he met Mr. Martin at a 1979 Super Bowl party in Miami and talked him into trying cocaine. Mr. Stone said that he had sold a small amount of cocaine to Mr. Martin and that they shared the drug "two or three times."
Mr. Martin denied the allegations, and no charges were filed. But four months later, the Cowboys sent Mr. Martin to the Hazelden Foundation Clinic in Minnesota, the National Football League's designated substance-abuse center.
He tested clean for drugs, returning a week later to tell reporters he had nothing to hide.
Former Cowboys head coach Tom Landry stated then that Mr. Martin was sent to evaluate the program, not for rehab.
"I don't feel he's involved [with drugs] right now. A year or two years ago, I don't know," Mr. Landry said in 1983.
"Somebody can use coke [cocaine], and it's like beer to some extent," he said, reflecting the conventional early 1980s perceptions on the subject. "We're talking about recreational coke. That's a big difference with chemical dependency."
The former coach recently said through a spokeswoman that he was unavailable to comment.
Mr. Henderson said the team's position was greeted skeptically by the media and other players.
"Harvey had a drug problem when he was playing, and the Cowboys had to know he had a drug problem," he said.
Former Cowboys personnel director Gil Brandt said that, without spot drug testing, he never knew of any proof that Mr. Martin used drugs. Had team officials known there was a problem, he said, they would have insisted that Mr. Martin get help, even if it hurt the team.
By 1980, Ms. Bell noticed a change in her boyfriend. "His public and private persona had been essentially the same. Then, somehow, he went over a line," she said.
Her fiance became increasingly wrapped up in a seamy, glitzy drug world, she said. That included the rampant womanizing that Mr. Martin admitted in his book.
Twice, Ms. Bell said, she broke off their engagements, finally leaving Mr. Martin in 1981.
"When all of a sudden, the people you're partying with are kind of a shadier side of life, it becomes your lifestyle," she said. "I'm not a cold person, but I have a sense of survival. And I felt I couldn't survive in all that."
In his book, Mr. Martin admitted occasional use of drugs, without any details, and said he never knew Mr. Henderson was using drugs until it was too late to help him.
In fact, Mr. Martin's lawyer says his client now admits that he got his first taste of cocaine just after the 1978 Super Bowl, a full year before Mr. Stone showed up.
Mr. Isenberg and others who have written and talked to Mr. Martin -some of whom say they used drugs with him - say Mr. Martin has shared anecdotes to show how his drug use escalated steeply.
For instance, Mr. Martin recalled a stop at a Honolulu mall during a Pro Bowl trip to Hawaii. His purchase: a hot plate and baking soda, to freebase cocaine in his hotel room.
After Mr. Martin retired in 1984, the countless promotional jobs quietly tailed off into a medley of celebrity golf tournaments, autograph signings, business deals and broadcasting gigs, though never the network job Mr. Martin had trolled for during his final playing days.
At the same time, the good-guy news stories that Mr. Martin had gotten used to continued.
They told of Mr. Martin's fledgling acting career, his local stage roles as Felix Unger in The Odd Couple, and Mr. Applegate, the singing, dancing devil in Damn Yankees.
But other news accounts and police reports hinted at trouble, at bounced checks and drunken-driving charges, marijuana arrests and assault allegations, all resolved without prison time.
Over the last decade, Mr. Isenberg and others said, Mr. Martin slipped into a marginal existence of drug dependency.
Based on their conversations with Mr. Martin, they described his downward spiral: There was the day in the early 1990s when he sat alone and hungry with his dog in a dark, cold dream house, his utilities cut off and the bank about to seize the property. His concerned mother stopped by and drove Mr. Martin to a 7-Eleven to buy some cold cuts.
Mr. Martin has told the story of one winter day when he had some crack cocaine but nowhere warm to smoke it, so he ducked into a Whataburger restroom to inhale his stash.
Between apartments - most recently a $795-a-month rental - Mr. Martin slept in cheap hotel rooms, in cars and on friends' couches. There were the fallings-out with family and the former teammates and friends who refused his calls.
Among the police reports was an incident ominously similar to his most recent legal run-ins:
In 1991, Mr. Martin's live-in girlfriend called police to complain that he had hit her with his fist and threw a jar at her nose during a fight. Police noted a nasty cut, redness and swelling on her face.
Arresting officers said Mr. Martin wrestled them to the ground and shoved an officer against the wall. They charged Mr. Martin with assault and resisting arrest. They added a marijuana-possession charge after finding a bag of the drug in his pants pocket.
Mr. Martin bonded out, and five hours later, neighbors called police to report a man with a gun at the apartment. The officers found Mr. Martin's girlfriend, with new bruises and red marks, complaining that he had broken in and assaulted her again, dragging her around the apartment by her hair and punching her. Officers noted patches of missing hair.
After she said that Mr. Martin had threatened to kill her if she didn't retract the charges, police added retaliation charges.
All but the marijuana and resisting-arrest charges were dropped after the woman refused to testify. Mr. Martin pleaded no-contest to the remaining charges, which were dismissed after he served probation for a year.
In the first of his two latest police encounters, Mr. Martin was arrested on March 29 after a fight with a different live-in girlfriend at a different Dallas apartment. She complained that, high on crack, Mr. Martin had slapped her and punched her in the ribs, grabbed her hair, thrown her to the ground and locked her out in her nightgown.
Police again accused Mr. Martin of resisting arrest. They found cocaine in his pocket, enough for a felony charge.
Mr. Martin was released on $2,500 bond. His initial version of events, as told to radio station KTCK-AM (1310) in a taped interview: His girlfriend had broken into his house, intoxicated, as he sat soberly munching Hamburger Helper in his living room.
Not wanting neighbors to be disturbed by her ranting, he said, he "politely put her outside."
"I will admit that I was so upset with the yelling, I grabbed her by her hair and pulled her off of my fence and put her outside," he said on the radio. "That was enough for the police to say abuse, and I'm saying, `Hell, I'm just trying to keep the peace around here.'
"Gosh, I didn't hit her. Oh, no I didn't hit her. I don't hit women. I mean, hell, I don't hit men. I can't."
He hadn't resisted arrest, he said, and police officers had planted the drugs on him.
On Aug. 13, officers were called to the apartment again, in response to another disturbance in which Mr. Martin was charged with assaulting his girlfriend. Her brother charged that Mr. Martin had called and threatened to "cut him up into little pieces" if he helped push the assault case, so police added a charge of telephone retaliation.
The judge raised Mr. Martin's bail to $200,000, keeping him in jail. Mr. Isenberg, the defense attorney, had obtained affidavits from Mr. Martin's girlfriend and her brother, saying they didn't want to press charges.
But policies had changed since Mr. Martin's earlier assault case: Prosecutors decided to push ahead, with or without the alleged victims' testimony, their position strengthened by Mr. Martin's own admissions on the radio.
On the cocaine charge, Mr. Martin pleaded no-contest in late August, agreeing to a $1,000 fine and seven years' probation. That included six to nine months' rehabilitation in the Dallas County Judicial Treatment Center, a no-locks, campus like facility in Wilmer.
If he completes the seven years trouble-free - including random drug testing - that case will be dismissed. Mr. Martin also withdrew his earlier claims that law officers had planted the drugs on him.
On the charges of assault, telephone harassment and resisting arrest, Mr. Martin got probation and was ordered to attend a six-month domestic-violence counseling class.
"He finally reached the point where he wanted to get well," Mr. Isenberg said, adding that Mr. Martin envisions a future as a spokesman against drug abuse.
Mr. Henderson said it's hard to know for certain what's making Mr. Martin tick.
"Whenever prison is staring a man in the eye, it's a great motivator," he said. "Three years from now, we'll know whether Harvey is serious about not drinking and drugging, or whether he just wanted to avoid prison."
By all accounts, the biggest force in Mr. Martin's life has always been his 70-year-old mother, Helen.
Mrs. Martin declined to offer anything more than brief comments on her son's situation.
"I could just say so many wonderful things about him, but I'd be late for church," said Mrs. Martin, reacting angrily to a question about the recent assault.
"Why is it always Harvey Martin, the monster? What would you do if you took your woman's keys away, and you were sitting there eating your dinner, and she broke into your house?
"Do you mean to say you can honestly tell me you've never hit a woman?"
Mr. Martin has a 25-year-old son, born to a Dallas woman while Mr. Martin was in college. The man, raised by his mother and never a part of Mr. Martin's public life, declined to comment other than to say his father is a good person. Mr. Martin also has an 11-year-old daughter who lives with Mr. Martin's mother.
Those who know Mr. Martin well attribute the violence to drug use. But experts said it's a mistake to think that getting an abusive person off drugs will automatically stop the violence.
"Usually there are issues unrelated to drug use: Mainly, a need to control others, physically if necessary," said Karen Perkins, executive director of the Tarrant County Women's Center.
Mr. White, the former Steeler, said Mr. Martin should realize that his celebrity has probably helped him get a chance to turn things around.
"It's time to grow up," he said. "Don't blow it."
When he was arrested in April, Mr. Martin filled out a personal profile for his bondsman. He listed a beeper number as his office phone and described himself as self-employed in public relations, with $100,000 annual income. In the blanks marked "Previous employer" and "Supervisor," he wrote, "Dallas Cowboys" and "Tom Landry."
That self-description, friends say, offers a window into Mr. Martin's psyche: centered on bygone glory -with a celebrity's special vulnerability to public humiliation.
"I'm just so afraid that, because he is so prideful, and because he cares so much what people think, he's going to do something crazy," Mr. Pearson said. "Forget about that public image stuff. I say to heck with that. He's given his whole professional life to other people.
"I say, `Harvey, don't do it for your kids, don't do it for your mother, the crowds or some Joe down the street,"' he said.
"Do it for Harvey."
