Between the Bylines Page 8

  At least I can take solace in the fact that I never was mean-spirited or exploitative. Certainly, I took liberties with the truth on occasion, but I never fleeced anyone out of money or made promises I didn’t plan to keep save for one notable exception. Still, the inevitable partings resulted in hurt feelings for those who invested an emotional stake for a long-term commitment.

  The latter became a particular source of frustration to one lady I had been seeing for a time who startled me one Sunday morning in January 1990 when she issued a daring manifesto that left me speechless.

  Julie B. was a tall, determined, striking lady of Danish origin accustomed to getting her way, since she had set sales records peddling perfume for Nordstrom, an upscale department store. “I want a ring and a date,” she told me in no uncertain terms. I gave her a blank stare and didn’t answer.

  My friend Mark Emerzian stopped by a few minutes after her declaration. While I was out jogging, she asked Emerzian, “Do you think Doug will marry me?”

  “No,” he replied honestly. She and I stopped seeing each other within a week.

  No matter who was culpable of the various breakups with which I was involved, I always attempted to maintain an affable posture in the aftermath, although there were those women who weren’t forgiving of sudden departures. Twice during that period, I brought ladies I had met in Europe—one a Paris bartender, another a six-foot-two Amsterdam model—to Long Beach. Both times, for various reasons, I sent them back prematurely. And they weren’t exactly joyful about it, expressing their displeasure loudly, albeit in their native tongues, which, thankfully, I couldn’t understand. I felt so bad about my treatment of the Dutch woman—her only offense was bad timing—that I even bought her a ticket to San Francisco, where she stayed three days at the Hilton Hotel on my dime before she returned to Amsterdam.

  Donald Sterling (left), the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, is seen in this shot with Doug and his longtime friend Mark Emerzian.

  Another time, I was to set to have a weekend stay at the Mirage in Las Vegas with a lady flying in from Chicago named Mary B. We had seen each other periodically since we had met eight and a half years earlier in Miami at the first Alexis Arguello–Aaron Pryor fight. But before I went out to McCarran Airport to pick her up on that long-ago Friday evening in June 1990, I decided to have a few drinks at the Mirage Sports Bar, where my old pal from Long Beach, Leon Bartolino, was the mixologist.

  I spotted an athletic-looking lady with close-cropped blond hair seated a few stools away talking to Bartolino, and moments later I asked him who she was.

  Doug is depicted with Mary B.

  “You know Karin, she worked at Recreation Golf Course in Long Beach as a bartender when she was going to Long Beach State,” he said.

  “No, I really don’t remember her. Introduce her to me,” I said.

  Well, to make a lengthy story concise, Karin R., whom I mentioned earlier as the lady I had parted ways with a few days before meeting Gillian, joined me for drinks. I liked her immediately, and she accepted my brazen invitation to join Mary B. and me for Chinese food later that evening at the Mirage, much to Mary B.’s displeasure.

  Mary B. got excessively drunk in reaction, and I feigned outrage and kicked her out of my room the next morning, which resulted in her immediately returning to Chicago and my being able to spend the rest of the weekend with Karin R., who within a month moved in with me. Such is the maddening fickleness and numbing disloyalty of single life.

  Actually, the quickest I had anyone move into my house—I was able to retain it after my split with M with a $33,000 settlement, which was a lot of money in those days—was in the spring of 1983 when I went to Palm Springs to do a story on the heavyweight fighter Gerry Cooney, who was in training after being stopped by Larry Holmes in a much ballyhooed world heavyweight title fight the previous year.

  I checked into the hotel where Cooney was staying and instantly became enamored by the young gal at the front desk. I’ll call her Karen D., and she was a stunner with all the requisite curves.

  Well, to make still another lengthy story concise, I coaxed her into having lunch with me the next day, which she had off—she brought along her two-year-old daughter—and I invited her to visit me in Long Beach. And a week later, she called to tell me she had been fired from her job and that she’d be coming over to see me along with her daughter. But what she didn’t tell me was that she would be coming with her car filled with all her belongings.

  She arrived on a Sunday morning, and after locating a babysitter for her daughter, I took Karen D. to a Los Angeles Dodgers game that afternoon and a Lakers game that evening—and she moved in with me the next day.

  I was thirty-nine at the time—she had just turned twenty-three—and for a few months at least, I didn’t mind curtailing my social activities since I was totally absorbed by Karen D.’s dazzling beauty and body. “It’s like you’re suddenly living with a Playboy foldout,” said my friend Joe Dee Fox, a keen observer of female culture who summed up my feelings perfectly.

  All Karen D., an Indiana native with a refreshing innocence for someone possessing such virtues, wanted in those days was to get married, which eventually led to our downfall. She is the one I still have guilty feelings about because I lied terribly to her, promising to marry her in the wake of losing an enormous amount of money gambling even though I had no intention of doing so.

  I later had many rollicking adventures during my travels on the European trains—I always purchased a Euro Rail pass—and one of the most memorable came during the nine-hour trip between Vienna and Berlin in which I met in the dining car a recently separated blond dentist from Vienna who was on the way to attend a dental convention in Leipzig. She never made it there. We wound up having a few days of gaiety in Berlin and a few more in Hamburg, where we stayed at one of my favorite hotels in Europe, the Atlantic on Alster Lake, and where the party ended. Actually, it could have continued the following weekend in Paris, and she thought it would. But I called her from Paris to tell her that something had come up and that I had to cancel. Nothing more important came up other than my wanting to be with a Parisian lady friend, Françoise—and I never saw the Austrian dentist again.

  This is the way I was before I fell in love with Gillian, who was to change me like no one else was able to do.

  Doug and Karin R. share a reflective moment.

  Karen D. poses with Doug.

  September 1999 (The Revelation)

  I’ll never forget the moment Gillian mentioned it to me, although at the time I didn’t think anything of it. I mean, at the time, she was exercising strenuously and enthused about being enrolled for the second year at Long Beach State, taking courses that she needed to complete in order to take the California physical therapy exam.

  At the time, we were so happy together, set to celebrate our second wedding anniversary, planning for a future we hoped would include a child.

  We still were basking in the afterglow of our August vacation in which almost every day had been a pleasurable experience, especially for someone like Gillian who had never traveled extensively in this country or Canada.

  I rented a new Lincoln Town Car, and we took a two-week journey through Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, Washington, Oregon and down the California coast. We also went into Canada, where we drove across the Canadian Rocky Mountains from Banff to Vancouver.

  It was a grueling trip because we were always on the move, except for an extended stay in Ketchum, a quaint town located in the Idaho ski paradise of Sun Valley. And we hadn’t even planned on that five-day diversion and did so only at the vehement insistence of my sister, Ginny (Bunny) Clements, an energetic livewire who had successfully taken over the family Budweiser distributorship in Tucson and other Arizona locales after the 1994 death of her husband, Bill Clements. We stayed at her summer home in Ketchum.

  Gillian was awed by the alpine beauty we encountered throughout the trip, and no place impressed her more than Lake Louise with
its crystal-clear blue water at the base of glacier-clad peaks in Banff National Park in Alberta.

  “I’ve seen things I never thought in my life I would see, and many things I didn’t even know existed,” she later would say when we went through the giant redwoods in Humboldt County along the northern California coast and stayed one evening at a bed-and-breakfast near Mendocino, birthplace of my mother.

  We both were passionate about traveling and experiencing new places—in three months we would welcome the twenty-first century in the Syrian capital of Damascus—and I recall us early one evening sitting in the front room of my small Long Beach tract home when she said casually to me, “I’ve had some blood in my stool recently.”

  In light of ensuing developments, I should have reacted with concern. But I didn’t. I had no idea about the potential dangers of such symptoms. I only said, “We’ll have the doctor check it out.”

  I had a family doctor I had been seeing for eighteen years and had a good rapport with him. He also took care of the medical needs of a couple local professional athletic teams. I had total trust in him, which, as it turned out, was a horrific mistake on my part. We went to see the doctor, and he gave Gillian a blood test and a rectal exam. Apparently, he found nothing seriously wrong, although there certainly was something seriously wrong.

  In retrospect, the doctor should have ordered a colonoscopy, as several other physicians have since told me. But he didn’t. It was an unconscionable oversight, a malpractice-caliber transgression, since a colonoscopy would have quickly detected the cause of her bleeding. Perhaps the good doctor was overburdened by his duties with the professional athletic teams that did take up a lot of his time. Gillian later would tell me she didn’t mention her condition to me for another six months because she felt the rectal bleeding was caused by hemorrhoids and was embarrassed to make such an admission.

  During that time, I forgot about it, actually thought it had gone away since Gillian had remained quiet. I now wish I had brought up the subject again to Gillian. She later would admit to me that the bleeding never stopped and that she began experiencing increasing pain in that region.

  In a movie, when an actor fumbles a line, the director can do another take to rectify it. I wish it were like that in the medical field when a doctor fumbles his job.

  If it was, Gillian still might be alive.

  To this moment, I’m still haunted by my not being unduly alarmed by Gillian’s revelation—and not pressing the family doctor for a comprehensive explanation, which he never offered. The doctor, to his shame, acted as though Gillian was perfectly healthy. But she wasn’t. She was sick, very sick, only we wouldn’t find out the graveness of her sickness until it was too late.

  Chapter 13

  I was surprised in early November 1995 when I received a letter from Gillian. While I certainly hadn’t forgotten her, I finally had given up attempting to get together with her again, since she had firmly been resisting my periodic blandishments.

  In fact, I hadn’t spoken to her in almost a year, and time had dimmed the memory. But as I read her letter with its tone of sadness and hurt—apparently, a lengthy on-and-off relationship had totally disintegrated—my interest in her suddenly again stirred.

  I phoned her immediately, and we had a light, pleasant conversation about sundry subjects when I informed her I would be in Cannes again for New Year’s. “You have to fly over and meet me there this year,” I said, and I expected another refusal that this time wouldn’t bother me one bit because my feelings for Gillian had waned, or so I thought. “You can’t stay mad at me forever. How are we ever going to get married if you continue to stay mad at me and not want to see me?”

  I could hear her laughing softly, and I realized maybe, just maybe, this time she might relent. “You’ll love Cannes,” I went on. “We’ll have lunch one day in Monte Carlo and visit the Maeght Gallery in the Saint Paul de Vence. There is so much to see in the South of France. It’s a wonderful place. Oh yes, there’s also a Renoir museum located in the home where he lived in Cagnes-sur-Mer. I’m sure you’ll love that, Gillian, because it’s supposed to be a beautiful place overlooking the Mediterranean.”

  Gillian remained silent, hadn’t interrupted me, hadn’t said, “It all sounds good, but no thanks, Douglas, because I still don’t trust you and I still haven’t forgotten what you did.”

  I perceived this as a good sign. And then I couldn’t believe what I was hearing when she finally spoke.

  “OK, Douglas, I’ll go, but we must sleep in separate beds,” she said.

  “Oh, that’ll be no problem,” I said, barely able to contain my joy.

  “I mean it, Douglas—separate beds,” she said.

  After three years, Gillian finally had relented, finally was willing to see me again—with conditions, of course.

  After I hung up, I felt regretful and thought about my many misguided decisions across the years. Why did I treat Gillian so badly? Why did I marry my first wife when I knew from the start it never would last? Why did I allow myself to get caught up in something as insidious as gambling? Why did I so blithely once reject Arnold Schwarzenegger’s persistent offer to write his first book?

  I figure a psychiatrist could figure out my self-destructive tendencies that were graphically reflected in my folly with Schwarzenegger, who went on to become an internationally famous action film star not that long after I first made his acquaintance.

  “You fucked up, Krikorian,” Schwarzenegger would say years later to me one evening when we came across each other after a Lakers game in The Forum press lounge.

  “Yes, I did,” I answered.

  And, oh, did I!

  I had written a column in 1976 on Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Herald Examiner centered on a book called Pumping Iron that featured Schwarzenegger and later was made into a critically acclaimed documentary. It was written by George Butler and Charles Gaines.

  I met with Schwarzenegger and Butler one morning at the Case Delicatessen across the street from the historic Herald Examiner Building at Eleventh and Broadway in downtown Los Angeles and interviewed the pair for more than two hours.

  Schwarzenegger and I hit it off immediately when he realized I had an extensive weightlifting background.

  When the story appeared two days later in the Herald Examiner—it was stripped across the top of the sports page with a photo of a buff, flexing Schwarzenegger accompanying it—Schwarzenegger called me at the newspaper.

  “I can’t thank you enough,” said the future governor of California, who was twenty-nine at the time and the reigning Mr. Olympia. “This is the first time I’ve ever been featured in a mainstream publication.”

  He paused a moment and then said, “Look, I have an offer from Simon & Schuster to write a bodybuilding book. And I want you to write it with me. I feel comfortable with you, and I know you’re my kind of guy.”

  He gave me his home number, and I told him the idea intrigued me and that I would get back to him, which I quickly did after consulting with a literary agent named Mike Hamilburg.

  When I spoke to Schwarzenegger again, he told me I’d get $5,000 up front and would receive 20 percent of the royalties.

  Hamilburg said I should get a larger slice, and the next time I spoke to Schwarzenegger I told him I wanted a fifty-fifty split on the royalties.

  He said 30 percent was the best he could do, and I told him I’d think about it.

  In looking back, I probably was uninterested in taking on what would have been a laborious writing project and was subconsciously looking for a plausible excuse to get out of doing it.

  But I didn’t come up with one. What I did, instead, was simply not call Schwarzenegger back. A month elapsed without us talking, and I figured he had found another author, which was fine with me.

  But one early evening, while I was watching TV in the front room of our Long Beach home, the phone rang, and my wife, M, answered it in the kitchen. “Some guy named Arnold wants to talk to you,” she yelled out. />
  It turned out to be Arnold Schwarzenegger.

  “Hey, Doug, you must have lost my number because I haven’t heard from you, but I still want you to write the book,” was the first thing he said when I got on the line. “Let’s get this done. Let’s meet. C’mon out to my apartment in Santa Monica.”

  So a couple days later I went to Santa Monica and never will forget seeing Arnold Schwarzenegger and his close bodybuilding friend Franco Columbu working feverishly in the front yard of Schwarzenegger’s apartment. They looked like heavily muscled carpenters as they hammered away on a wooden couch.

  “Let’s get this book thing done today,” said Schwarzenegger. “Like I said before, you’re my kind of guy. I know you know a lot about weightlifting. I know I can work with you. I’ll give you sixty-forty on the royalties. OK? That should settle it. Have your agent call me. OK?”

  I remember gazing thoughtfully at these men who already had won many international physique contests and were featured regularly in Joe Weider’s physique magazines, and it seemed such an anomaly to see them there in the middle of the afternoon working on a piece of furniture in a quiet Santa Monica neighborhood. They were far removed from what both eventually would become—Schwarzenegger a major player in the movie industry and California politics and Columbu a successful chiropractor.

  Schwarzenegger and I shook hands, but we didn’t see each other again until our paths crossed twenty-two years later at The Forum.

  I went home that day after the meeting with Schwarzenegger and decided covering the Rams for the Herald Examiner took up enough of my time. I never bothered to phone Schwarzenegger, and I guess he got the hint since he never again phoned me.