Between the Bylines Page 5

  “I’m coming right home,” I said.

  “Is something wrong?” asked Zanardi, guessing by my solemn reaction to the call that there was.

  “Yes, there is,” I said, excusing myself and hurriedly heading for the exit.

  When I got home, Gillian was lying in bed, and my devoted neighbor, Esther Fawcett, who had become sort of my surrogate mother with mine residing 230 miles away in Fowler, was seated next to her.

  Gillian had tears in her eyes when she saw me, and I could only shake my head in despair.

  “It’s not good,” is all she said. “I’m afraid I’ve miscarried.”

  We drove to Long Beach Memorial Medical Center, where it was discovered the fetus no longer had a heartbeat. Gillian soon underwent a procedure performed by her doctor, and later a nurse brought the fetus wrapped in a blanket into her hospital room.

  “Would you like to hold him?” she asked me.

  I did and looked down at the fetus that was to be my son, was to be my most precious legacy, was to bring so much joy to Gillian and me.

  I held him for a couple of minutes and was overwhelmed with a sad emptiness that I would feel often in the coming years. I wept.

  It had all happened so suddenly, so unexpectedly, so shockingly.

  We were set to order a crib that day, and the previous day we had been discussing what to name our son.

  And now we were steeped in grief.

  That was the first agonizing day that Gillian and I experienced in our marriage, but unfortunately, it would not be the last.

  In retrospect, it’s almost ghoulishly ironic that the only driver I talked to that day at the Long Beach Grand Prix press conference was Alex Zanardi, whose career would come to a tragic end on September 15, 2001, the day Gillian passed away, when he was involved in a frightening crash at the Euro-Speeway Lausitz in Germany that resulted in his having both legs amputated.

  Chapter 6

  After Gillian’s first trip to America in late September 1992, I continued to juggle my trio of jobs—newspaper, radio, TV—and she continued to work her therapeutic skills on physically challenged elderly folk in London.

  While I certainly had a fondness for Gillian at the time and remained in regular telephone contact, old habits don’t magically disappear. I had been single for a long time and had become accustomed to its liberating sovereignty. I liked being able to do what I wanted to do when I wanted to do it without restraint from another party.

  I had become satisfied with my life the way it was, and I wanted to keep it that way—or at least I thought I did. And anyway, at that time, there remained in me vestiges of emotion for the lady I had just split from when I met Gillian. Her name was Karin R., and we actually had lived together for a year until she decided to return to her hometown—the California resort hamlet of Pebble Beach—to get an MBA degree at the Monterey Institute of International Studies.

  Karin and I maintained cordial relations, and she continued to make periodic visits to Southern California to see old friends, as well as her Beverly Hills hairstylist, a gentleman who went by the name of Christophe and who later gained international fame for styling the locks of the forty-second president of the United States, Bill Clinton. She would stay with me during those visits.

  We once had almost a maniacal affection for each other, but our relationship became complicated and eventually dissolved—as did the only other serious one I had after my 1981 divorce—because of my skittishness about marriage, for which I developed almost a pathological fear.

  Karin R. and Doug during gleeful times.

  I had become terribly disillusioned with the institution after trying it for eight years with a lady I shall call M. I don’t know if it’s a reflection of just how disillusioned I was, but to this moment, I have no idea the day or month when M and I got married. I know it happened sometime in 1973, when I was still too young and frisky at twenty-nine to endure its constraints, which I too often found discomforting and too often simply ignored.

  I do remember with horror what happened when I violated the nocturnal deadlines M imposed on me. I would be showered with a stream of high-pitched invectives as well as thrown articles.

  In those days, I sparred a lot at the Westminster Boxing Gym and became adept at ducking punches, a skill I’m sure was honed by my having to duck the various flying objects that M aimed at me when she lost her temper.

  M’s anger was understandable late in our marriage when I’m sure by then she knew I no longer was serious about upholding the sacredness of monogamy.

  But early in the marriage, when for the most part I actually did, she alienated me continually with what I deemed her unreasonably stringent clock management.

  There are so many episodes that I can relate, but one can serve as a microcosm of my grievances with M. It came in the summer of 1973, shortly after we moved into an apartment in the Long Beach seaside community of Belmont Shore. I was invited one evening to have dinner with several members of the Rams organization, including the team’s general manager, Don (Duke) Klosterman, and new coach, Chuck Knox.

  Klosterman was a superb raconteur who knew a lot of people in high places and was a close friend of Ethel Kennedy, widow of the slain Massachusetts senator Robert F. Kennedy, and also Edward (Ted) Kennedy, who served in the U.S. Senate for forty-seven years and would attend Klosterman’s funeral in June 2000.

  We ate at the Palmer House in Culver City and had a convivial time, as the drinks and stories flowed liberally in the male-only gathering. I called M at about ten o’clock and informed her that I might not be home until midnight—an hour later than she expected—and that this get-together was vital to my work. Remember, I was just in my second season of covering the Rams for the Herald Examiner and still building sources.

  You would have thought I had informed M that I was spending the evening with Raquel Welch, then the reigning sex goddess of film. She exploded in anger and hung up on me. She remained mad for almost a week, refusing to even talk to me. It would be a reaction often repeated throughout our troubled marriage.

  M was a thin, loyal, supportive, obsessively neat blond lady of German heritage—she was born in Munich—who was an exceptional cook, but I always felt I was ensnared in shackles during our time together. When I was away from home at night for one reason or another, I always found myself nervously checking my watch so I wouldn’t miss M’s curfew, which I often did anyway. As a symbolic act of defiance, I threw that old Longine into a garbage bin the day I left M.

  Still, while M’s excessive possessiveness led to many prolonged conflicts that created serious fissures in our marriage—as did my carefree attitude toward the institution at the time—it was another development that probably finished it.

  And, ironically, M had nothing to do with it.

  You must understand that for almost a year of the marriage—throughout a good portion of 1977—I actually lived a monastic existence. That was the most tranquil period of it because I spent almost all my spare time at home, to the delight of M. I didn’t drink, didn’t do much of anything except write my articles for the Herald Examiner and work on a project in which I had become totally absorbed.

  Doug covered the Rams teams coached by Chuck Knox (center). A veteran head coach of five NFL teams, Knox’s stints with the Rams were from 1973 to 1977 and 1992 to 1994. Jimmy Torosian is on the right.

  Don Klosterman (center), pictured here with Doug, was general manager of the Los Angeles Rams in the 1970s. Donnie Srabian is on the left.

  I began writing the Great American Novel—or at least the Great American Sports Novel. I noticed the incredible success novelists like Harold Robbins and Sidney Sheldon were having at the time—I devotedly read all their latest renderings—and figured I could do the same with an athletic twist to the prose.

  I had been covering the Rams on a regular basis since the 1972 season and decided to take advantage of the knowledge I had built up about the underbelly of pro football: the widespread gambling, the Super
Bowl ticket scalping, the back-biting locker room bickering among the players and coaches, the excessive drinking and drug usage and marital infidelities of the players, etc.

  The fictional tale I created had all these ingredients in it and was centered on a star quarterback who owed bookmakers a lot of money and wound up paying off his immense debt by agreeing to dump the Super Bowl. I tried to make it a fast-paced read with a lot of sex, romance and subplots.

  The person I initially enlisted to help me find a publisher was the high-powered Beverly Hills entertainment attorney E. Gregory Hookstratten, who had a lot of big contacts and whose clients included the likes of Johnny Carson, Tom Snyder, Tom Brokaw, Vin Scully and, at the time, Rams owner Carroll Rosenbloom.

  I’ll never forget the late December Friday afternoon that my wife and I met with Hookstratten in his Beverly Hills office and I presented him with a manuscript of my book, which I called Super Scandal. I even had a celebratory drink with Hookstratten and M, breaking my lengthy abstinence.

  “We’ll get it placed somewhere,” promised Hookstratten.

  A few days later, he called me from Hawaii, where he had been vacationing with his first wife, the actress Pat Crowley, and said, “Love your book. Can’t put it down, read it in one day.”

  But before I could savor those joyful words, he quickly added, “I’m afraid I can’t help you get it placed. It would be a conflict of interest for me. I’m not sure Carroll Rosenbloom or Pete Rozelle [the NFL commissioner] would want this book in print, especially with the revelations in it about the Super Bowl ticket scalping and some other sensitive things that wouldn’t exactly shed a positive light on the NFL. I know it’s a novel, but a lot of the stuff you write about is not exactly nonfiction.”

  Doug is pictured with Carroll Rosenbloom, owner of the Los Angeles Rams from 1972 to 1979. Rosenbloom drowned at Golden Beach, Florida, in April 1979, and his wife, Georgia Frontiere, inherited 70 percent control of the Rams.

  I was crestfallen. I had spent so much time and energy on the book. Even when I was on road trips with the Rams that season, I had declined dinner invitations from the team’s PR people and sportswriting friends and remained secluded in my hotel room feverishly working on it. I routinely stayed up until midnight at home and had even stopped going to the fitness gym, which was the ultimate sacrifice for me.

  Where would I turn now?

  Well, there was a person I had befriended at the Herald Examiner named Arelo Sederberg—he was the newspaper’s business editor—who had written several novels that had sold well, like The Power Players and 60 Hours of Darkness.

  I gave him a copy of Super Scandal, and after he read it, he told me he liked it so much he had given it to his literary agent.

  “I don’t see any reason why this won’t be published,” said Sederberg, who once was a public relations spokesman for Howard Hughes.

  It turned out the literary agent liked it, too, and he told me a well-known publishing house—it was Simon & Schuster—was interested in it, but nothing ever happened. The literary agent planned to take it to other publishing houses but soon died of cancer.

  I also thought Super Scandal would make a good movie, and so did an actor acquaintance, Michael Dante, who gave the manuscript to the powerful film producer Howard Koch Jr.

  “This will take some time…The movie people move at a tortoise pace,” warned Dante.

  Dante was right, but I was too impatient in those days, and after waiting only a month, I told Dante I wanted my manuscript returned, which he reluctantly did before Koch even had an opportunity to read it.

  After that, in bitter frustration, I stuck the manuscript in the bottom drawer of the nightstand next to my bed, and it languished there untouched until I moved out of the house in the fall of 2009.

  There’s no doubt in my mind now that the deep disappointment I felt about the fate of my novel had a calamitous effect on my marriage.

  For a year, I had been the model husband. With the book no longer an obsessive priority with me, that changed quickly. During the next few years, much to the displeasure of my wife, I began staying out too late and drinking too much and routinely breaking vows of fidelity. M, now more than ever, had become an insufferably intrusive nuisance that I knew I had to escape, and I never will forget what I told her one early Friday evening in May 1981 when I headed out the front door.

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “I’m going down to the end of the block,” I answered.

  I came back six days later, and a month later M and I were done.

  Chapter 7

  I should have known better than to get hooked up with a lady inclined to possessiveness.

  A few years before marrying M, I was involved with one who was responsible for the most embarrassing, shocking, stunning, bewildering, astonishing moment of my life.

  Nothing since has come close to matching it. In fact, more than forty years later, I still find the incident in a downtown Los Angeles motel so implausibly unreal that it’s difficult to believe it actually happened.

  But it did, and I still cringe at the thought of it. In the spring of 1969, when I was covering the Lakers for the Herald Examiner—that was the spring they would lose a storied seven-game series to the Boston Celtics in the NBA finals in the farewell appearance of the Celtics’ sainted center Bill Russell—I began dating a lady I shall call X. Actually, it was she who began dating me, since she was the one who lured me into her boudoir.

  Now you must understand that at the time I was only a few years removed from Fowler and wasn’t exactly a seasoned performer with the opposite sex, seldom going out with women during my years at Fresno State when weightlifting commanded so much of my attention and when my sexual appetites were mostly sated by curvaceous young women whom I indemnified for their services.

  While I doubt Fresno still had the thirty-two houses of prostitution the nationally syndicated columnist Drew Pearson wrote about in one of his dispatches on January 24, 1950, in reference to the city’s widespread racketeering activities, that particular trade still flourished in the early 1960s when a phone call to a lady named Jean would result in an alluring thirty-minute session at a local motel room. She always had four lovelies on duty, would provide the vitals on each in descriptive language calculated to arouse and would set up the appointment.

  Most of the women came from either San Francisco or Los Angeles and were all in their early twenties or late teens, and all were exceedingly attractive. None spent more than a week in Fresno, as newcomers continually were added to the rotation to keep the excitement fresh.

  The fare originally was ten dollars, but inflation eventually hit the market, much to the horror of the bargain-seeking clients, and it had gone all the way up to twenty dollars when I departed Fresno for good in 1966.

  While I never met Jean, I did meet another madam named Betty, who had been a veteran of the profession for many decades and who had a two-story home on north Van Ness—an upscale area—in which she usually had at least three young women ready to deliver gratification.

  Not all practitioners of sexual delights in Fresno were young. There was an elderly lady in town named Myrtle whose skill at fellatio had become so legendary that Herb Caen even dropped an item on her in his widely read column in the San Francisco Chronicle. While Myrtle’s age might have been a deterrent to some, her popularity never wavered, for she dispensed her magical touch for a mere three dollars.

  Several generations of Fresno males grew up in such an environment, and it was a rite of passage for many to have their first sexual experience in this manner.

  I did as a seventeen-year-old in the summer of 1960 before my senior year in high school—I was employed as a busboy at the 99 Café Truck Stop in Fowler—when after work one evening I was driven by four Armenian bachelor grape farmers out to the ranch house of one of them, a guy called George (Barn Owl) Stephanian, where I nervously lost my virginity to a slim twenty-two-year-old blonde named Bobbi in one of the guest b
edrooms.

  It cost me five dollars, and I found out later I had an audience, as the four Armenian farmers peeked through a side window into the room that had a dimmed lamp in it. They didn’t exactly see a boffo performance by me, as I consummated the act in an instant.

  Anyway, as soon as I began residing in Southern California, I ceased with my pursuit of paid companionship and began navigating a more traditional sexual path, as I finally began discovering the joys of dating and of having sex without time constrictions.

  Certainly, none of the women I had taken out in those early days was even vaguely as alluring as X or had her immense experience in sensual pleasures.

  At the time I was seeing X, she was working at The Forum—I never really found out what she did—which was owned by a demonstrative one-time Canadian door-to-door encyclopedia salesman named Jack Kent Cooke. Cooke also owned the Lakers and Kings and would go on to own the Chrysler Building in New York and co-own the Washington Redskins with the famed attorney Edward Bennett Williams.

  Cooke was a domineering, pompous fellow given to polysyllabic spewings whom I got to know well while covering the Lakers. I was his dinner guest several times at Kings games, and I would sit next to him in his private box during the hockey proceedings that were totally alien to me but a particular passion of Cooke.

  X always had been friendly to me, but I never thought that this woman who was eight years older would have an interest in someone like me with hayseed still growing out of my thick brown hair. At least, not one who looked like her.

  But apparently she did. She surprised me one evening a few hours after a Lakers game when she asked if I’d give her a ride to her west Los Angeles residence. We had consumed a few drinks at The Forum press lounge, and there were several gentlemen in our gathering who hadn’t exactly hidden their desires to take X home.