Between the Bylines Page 6

  Yet she chose me for the honor. And I was even more surprised when we reached her apartment and she asked me to come inside and have a drink with her and then asked me to come and spend the night in bed with her, which I gladly did.

  At the time I met X, she already had been an experienced traveler on the LA social scene, having dated several actors and been a regular at the most popular nightclubs.

  She had done modeling in her younger years, and she had retained her slender five-foot-nine figure that never carried more than 115 pounds on it. She had thick blond hair, high cheekbones, perky breasts and looked as though she had stepped out of Vogue magazine.

  Like so many women with such attributes, she had gone through a lot of romantic turmoil—she already had been married three times—and I guess she saw in me a naïve guy with a muscular body and a high testosterone level who didn’t pose a threat to her tranquility.

  For the time I was with X—I saw her on a regular basis for about six months—she opened up stunning new vistas to me.

  She took me to hip apparel shops like Fred Segal’s on Melrose. She took me to the Luau, which was then a celebrity hangout on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills owned by Lana Turner’s ex, Stephen Crane. I later would become a close friend of the restaurant’s maître d’, Joe Stellini, who later would open up his own renowned place bearing his name with O.J. Simpson as one of his financial backers. She took me to Sneeky Pete’s on Sunset Boulevard, where the fabled Art Graham Trio performed and where I met a young, thin, unknown actor named Robert De Niro fresh from doing the cult baseball film Bang the Drum Slowly. I remember her once taking me to a nightclub in West Hollywood and introducing me to its owner, Eddie Nash, whom I didn’t know was then already a major drug dealer and who a few years later was linked to the infamous Wonderland Murders. She took me to a lot of places where I was introduced to a lot of interesting people and where we drank, ate and frolicked.

  Those were giddy times for a rube from Fowler, and X, who was thirty-two, often introduced me laughingly to her friends as “her pinkie,” an antecedent to “toy boy.” While X doted on me, she also demanded my time, too much of it after the months elapsed, and my fondness for her waned as other, younger ladies began diverting my attention.

  One of my hangouts in those long-ago days was a darkened downstairs bar in downtown LA on Figueroa near Ninth Street called The Gala that was operated by a gentleman named Ernie Tassop, a smoker, drinker, gambler and womanizer who was a friend of many boxers and baseball players, with the pitcher who delivered the Brooklyn Dodgers their only World Series triumph, Johnny Podres, being his closest.

  I began going to The Gala when I joined the Herald Examiner, as Van Barbieri, who was then the Olympic fight publicist, would take me and other sportswriters there for dinner before the Thursday night matches. Tassop, who consumed stingers (white crème de menthe and brandy) with an unrivaled frequency, took a liking to me. And what made his place even more inviting to favored customers like myself is that it was attached to a motel.

  A woman who caught my attention during the time I was seeing X was a young reporter—she was a recent Yale graduate—from my newspaper, and one Friday night we met for dinner at The Gala and then had drinks at the bar, with Tassop keeping them coming at a steady pace.

  I had lied to X earlier in the day that I would be tied up that evening at a Dodgers game and told her we’d get together on Saturday. We certainly did, but not in the manner I expected.

  I drank a lot more than usual that evening and a lot more than the young reporter did, but she did have her share, and she did accept my invitation to spend the night with me in one of The Gala motel rooms, which Tassop arranged for me to have gratis, as he had done on several previous occasions when I was with X.

  Apparently, long after we left the tavern and retired to the room, X showed up looking for me near closing time, and she quickly found out from one of the customers—I never did find out who the stoolie was—that I still was on the premises.

  X was a shrewd lady with Sherlock Holmes instincts and happened to know the woman who worked at the motel’s front desk, and I suspect she bribed her to secure a key to my room.

  To this day, I have no idea how I wasn’t awakened when X entered the room—I never heard a peep and, clearly, had drank myself into oblivion—but the young reporter lying next to me was, and X instructed the frightened woman to depart promptly.

  “The woman had her hand over my mouth and whispered into my ear to get out immediately and do it without making any noise—or I’d get hurt,” the young reporter later told me. “I was frightened to death. She had an absolutely murderous look on her face. She told me she was your wife, and I got out as quickly as I could. You were like under the covers next to me and didn’t move.”

  When I awoke early the next morning, I thought I was in the midst of a deep dream, or that I was hallucinating or that I was in some sort of weird trance.

  There, lying next to me nude, flashing daggers in my direction, was X.

  “You rotten, two-timin’ sonofabitch!” she roared.

  I recalled a line my pal Johnny Ortiz told me he once uttered—“Don’t believe your lying eyes”—when caught in a similar situation, and for a moment I thought of using it.

  But that glare X fixed me with was bereft of any sign of humor or forgiveness, and I meekly managed to mutter only, “Sorry.”

  That embarrassing episode would mark the end of my relationship with X, although we still would see each other on occasion for the next decade.

  I swore to myself afterward that I never again would be with a woman who acted as though I were her private chattel, and yet, for reasons that puzzle me to this day, I wound up marrying one.

  Chapter 8

  Although I had been enamored by Gillian during our two brief times together, I wasn’t smitten like a love-crazed teenager, especially since I felt the distance between us conspired against a lasting affiliation. But I did find myself being drawn to her in an enigmatic manner that I found both intriguing and worrisome.

  Gillian and I had planned to reconnect in London on New Year’s Eve 1992, and I was looking forward to seeing her, although I wouldn’t be seeing her alone. I had arrived in Europe that late December with one of my pals, Mike “The Hammer” DiMarzo, who was then a member of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and making his first European trip.

  It’s perhaps a reflection of the conflicting feelings I was having toward Gillian at the time that I would bring along DiMarzo, a bachelor with a mighty penchant for bar-shopping and women-chasing and late-night carousing. If I were truly serious about my romantic intentions with Gillian, why wouldn’t I have come alone instead of hauling along someone given to constant revelry? Was this my way of counteracting whatever emotions I had for Gillian?

  We landed in Paris, where we spent a couple days visiting the sights, sampling the food and spirits, sleeping minimally and nursing gut-wrenching hangovers that we vainly attempted to cure with early morning Bloody Marys. I then made a fateful decision that, in looking back, might have been responsible for Gillian and me not seeing each other for a lengthy period.

  Sugar Ray Leonard doesn’t seem too concerned with Doug’s pending knuckle sandwich. Mike “The Hammer” DiMarzo is on the right.

  We still had a week to go before hooking up with Gillian in London—she was set to bring a close lady friend from Hartlepool to be DiMarzo’s New Year’s Eve date—and we decided we had seen enough of Paris and would move on either to Rome or Budapest. Perhaps because I already had been to Rome a couple of times, I persuaded DiMarzo that Budapest would be a more exotic destination, not realizing that the capital of Hungary was being besieged by an awful cold front.

  We had a blast on the train from Paris to Munich—we spent most of it in the lounge car flirting with ladies and consuming vodka—and switched to another train in Munich on which we stayed in an overnight sleeper on the way to Budapest. But the carriage’s heater malfunctioned—the room
felt like being stuck in a supermarket freezer—and DiMarzo came down with the chills, which resulted in his having a high temperature by the time we reached Budapest. I doubt DiMarzo would have fallen sick had we gone to Rome with its milder climate.

  We checked into the Budapest Hilton, which was located on a hill in the Castle District overlooking the Danube River, and DiMarzo, despite still being ill, gallantly joined me the first couple of evenings in forays around the old city. I’m sure it didn’t help his condition that we drank far too much on the second night and then, after the bars closed, walked along nearly deserted streets for an hour in subzero temperatures without proper apparel trying vainly to locate a cab. By the time we finally did, we both were close to suffering hypothermia.

  When we got back to the hotel, DiMarzo’s condition had worsened significantly. A doctor was called to the room and found DiMarzo’s temperature had reached 103. He stayed in bed the next day and felt slightly better the following one, when we decided to fly to London earlier than we had planned. We figured a few days of resting comfortably in London would restore DiMarzo’s health.

  It didn’t. By the time we reached London and checked into the Park Lane Hilton, DiMarzo had become even sicker than he had been in Budapest. He remained bedridden the next two days and desperately wanted to return to America, despite his condition. Poor Mike DiMarzo. The beleaguered cop’s first trip to Europe had turned out to be a disaster. Except for the brief time in Paris, he had been sick the entire trip and wound up spending far more time in beds than he did in taverns, a terrible deprivation for him. We wound up flying out of London on December 29.

  What exacerbated an unfortunate scenario was that I somehow had lost my address book that contained not only Gillian’s Streatham Hill phone number but also the phone number of her parents’ home near Hartlepool, where she had been staying during Christmas.

  DiMarzo had pleaded for me to remain and insisted I didn’t have to accompany him back to LA. I was in a quandary. If I remained in London, my sick pal, still running a fever that had subsided slightly, would be making the long trek back alone, and I knew he wasn’t an experienced traveler and that he could face the misery of being bumped from a capacity flight because of his non-revenue buddy pass ticket. I also realized if I checked out of the Park Lane Hilton, where I knew Gillian would be able to reach me, I would be committing a terrible breach of etiquette. She and her girlfriend would be expecting to go out with Mike and me on New Year’s Eve, and they wouldn’t even hear from us, much less see us.

  I didn’t know quite what to do, but I guess loyalty to a pal trumped whatever feelings I then had for Gillian. Or did it? I easily could have chosen to remain alone at the Park Lane Hilton and wait for Gillian to contact me, which she attempted to do. DiMarzo wasn’t exactly on death’s door, and I’m sure this tough cop who had recently earned a Medal of Valor commendation from his department for bravery in the apprehension of an armed felon would have been able to make it back to LA on his own. I now think I chose to leave with DiMarzo because I had a subconscious desire to permanently cut off ties with Gillian, a tack I had taken with other women since my failed marriage.

  Still, when I got back to Long Beach, I felt guilty about not even giving Gillian an explanation for my absence. A couple weeks elapsed, and when I finally got my telephone bill—remember, those were the pre-cellphone days—that had Gillian’s number on it, I phoned her immediately and apologized profusely.

  She wasn’t exactly appeased.

  “How could you do that to me, Douglas?” she replied with irritation. “I called the hotel, and they told me you had checked out two days earlier. I asked them if you left any messages, and they said there were none. I couldn’t believe it. Here I brought my childhood girlfriend with me all the way from Hartlepool to go out with your friend, and you stood us up without any explanation. I was mad, and she was mad. We went to a bar in Streatham Hill, and we wound up both drinking too much. We had a terrible New Year’s Eve. Terrible. And I think you were very rude. I’ve been treated badly by men in the past, but not that badly. I really don’t want to talk to you again.”

  The phone went dead, and I suddenly felt terribly remorseful. How could I have lost my address book at such an inopportune time? I long had been irritatingly absent-minded, misplaced over the years keys, eyeglasses, wallets, documents and checks. But never before had I lost a lady’s phone number, and Gillian deserved better treatment than what she and her girlfriend had endured on that New Year’s Eve.

  I figured I’d soon forget Gillian and go on with my life, but I didn’t forget her.

  I did wait two months to call her again, figuring by then her anger toward me would have subsided. It hadn’t. She was civil but cool and reiterated her feelings about not wanting to see me again.

  Chapter 9

  At the dawn of 1993, the McDonnell-Douglas Show had become the hottest one in Southern California. We were commanding a lot of attention and had become an influential part of the Southern California sporting scene.

  Two days after Riddick Bowe became the world heavyweight champion by dethroning Evander Holyfield in Las Vegas in November, he and his entourage showed up at our Sunset Boulevard studio and went on the air with us. As he rode in a limo from LAX on the way to doing a taped appearance on Jay Leno’s TV show after winning Wimbledon the previous week at the age of thirty-three, Andre Agassi gave us a call. And later, Jay Leno himself came on and did a brief bit with us.

  Joe McDonnell and I were seen on a segment of Dan Rather’s nightly news show on CBS, and we made a couple other national TV appearances on that network with sportscaster Pat O’Brien. We did an hour hookup with Suzyn Waldman on WFAN in New York that was broadcast live in both Los Angeles and New York markets.

  When it was revealed in early January that John Robinson, who had been fired the previous year by the Los Angeles Rams, was returning for a second tour of coaching duty at the University of Southern California, Joe and I caused a major ruckus by spending four hours on our show eviscerating Robinson. Larry Stewart in the Times took issue with our treatment of Robinson, spending an entire column characterizing it as nothing more than a mean-spirited, vindictive public persecution of a person without even a vague semblance of balance, which, of course, was true. But the negative publicity only garnered us more widespread notoriety and increased our ratings.

  In the KMPC Radio days, Doug (right) and on-air partner Joe McDonnell (left) were known as the team of McDonnell-Douglas. Here, Doug puts the grab on Tommy Lasorda.

  The Super Bowl that year was between the Buffalo Bills and Dallas Cowboys at the Rose Bowl, and we did our shows during the week preceding it at the Century Plaza Hotel in Beverly Hills; among many others, our guests included O.J. Simpson, Joe Namath and the actor John Goodman, who turned out to be a loyal listener.

  I had known Simpson since his days at USC, and our conversations always centered on boxing and women when we ran into each other. I recall coming across Simpson once in the late 1970s at Joe Stellini’s restaurant on Pico Boulevard in Beverly Hills. He was seated in a booth with a stunning blonde and motioned me over to join him. As I sat down, she got up to talk to a friend at the bar, and I said to Simpson, “Wow! Who’s that?” “Her name is Nicole, and I’m going to marry her one day,” he replied. He did and later would be the only defendant in the Trial of the Century that absorbed the American public for the first ten months of 1995 when Simpson was accused of murdering Nicole Brown Simpson and a friend, Ronald Goldman. Simpson was found not guilty by a nullification jury, despite an overwhelming preponderance of evidence to indicate he was.

  KTLA-TV, Channel 7 sportscaster Stu Nahan points out his personalized California license plate for Doug.

  On the day before the Bills and Cowboys were to meet in Super Bowl XXVII on January 31, Joe and I did our show on the grounds outside the Rose Bowl, where the NFL was staging an expo, and more than one thousand people showed up to watch the event, chanting throughout the show, “McDonnell-
Douglas! McDonnell-Douglas! McDonnell-Douglas!” It was heady stuff—we stayed afterward signing autographs for more than an hour—and it seemed we were destined for a long and prosperous career together in the LA radio market that ranks as the top one in the country because of the millions of weekday commuters on the area’s many freeways.

  Ah, was I naïve! I still didn’t comprehend the notoriously dysfunctional nature of the radio business. Despite our success, our growing popularity, our high-profile status, the original McDonnell-Douglas Show—there would be later incarnations—came to an abrupt end in June when I was let go by the station’s management.

  This KMPC Sports Radio publicity still features partners Joe McDonnell and Doug.

  No plausible explanation was given, but by the sheerest coincidence, my one-year contract was up, and I was due to receive a sizable raise in the new one. And since the station was up for sale—the Cap Cities organization would purchase it the following year—and since cost cutting had become an imperative, I was summarily dismissed.

  There also might have been other contributing factors. Our show had stirred up its share of powerful detractors—including one sportscasting institution at the station who put the shiv in us to management—which, unfortunately, might have had an impact with general manager Bill Ward and also with Jackie Autry, wife of Gene, who was pulling the levers of power.

  I figured that would be the end of my time in radio, but naturally, I was offered a position again at KMPC at my former salary a few months later. But instead of being reunited with McDonnell, I was paired with a velvet-voiced newspaperman and Penn State graduate—he was a sports columnist for the Antelope Valley Press—named Brian Golden, nowhere near as shrill and outrageous as McDonnell but quite knowledgeable and likeable. We did the ten-to-two midday shift, and although our show wasn’t nearly as strident and controversial as the one I did with McDonnell, we managed to double the time slot ratings during our time together, which ended rather ignominiously.