In one conversation, she talked about what fun the player parties were in the fifties and sixties and how smashed some of the players and wives would get. She did not omit herself or Ken. She described a life that had a certain Mad Men sensibility. Not across the board, but in places. Intentions were pointed in her direction. They were not, she said, reciprocated. Not ever. This conflicted with something Ken had told others, that Conni had been (to use the word he used with me) “unfaithful.” Conni said the opposite was true.
She said that in 1966 or ’67, she had heard Ken was having an affair with a “barmaid at a key club.” That is, a female bartender at a private club where members put their drinks on a running tab and proved their membership by showing a key. Conni went to the bar with three of her friends. She asked the barmaid in question for a martini, and the barmaid asked to see Conni’s key.
“I don’t have one, but my husband does,” Conni said. “I’m Mrs. Ken Venturi.”
The other woman’s jaw practically hit the bar.
“I tipped her two quarters,” Conni said. “My friends said I shouldn’t have tipped her at all, but I thought that was more humiliating, giving her the two quarters.
“When Ken came home that night, I put out two fists. I opened one hand and said, ‘Here’s your friend at the bar.’ I opened the other one and said, ‘Here are the kids and me. You have to choose.’ He said, ‘I want you and the kids.’ He was crying like a baby. But he never stopped seeing her.”
Yet if Ken saw Conni having an intimate conversation with any famous man at a party—Arnold Palmer, James Garner, Chuck Connors—he would erupt on the way home. Or even not so famous. In good times, and there were many, they would look at the modest and dutiful wife of this player or that one and joke about how much happier Ken would have been had he married “a little brown wren.” Instead, he was stuck with a Sophia Loren look-alike.
When Conni suggested that Ken sign on with Mark McCormack, Arnold’s agent and the founder of IMG, he became furious. He became furious when she made any sort of business suggestion. “I want you to be my wife, not my business manager!” he once yelled at her, as Conni recalled it.
She talked about Ken’s collection of firearms, ten or twelve guns plus a gold-plated pistol given to him by Jerry Lewis after a night at the Lewis house when the comedian and the golfer practiced their Quick Draw McGraw routines. She said Ken would wave a gun around when he had been drinking, and that on one occasion he accidently fired a shot in their house. She said that one year at the Pine Inn, a popular hotel among the golfers playing in the Crosby, Ken locked her in a giant rectangular suitcase for several minutes, letting her out only because of her hysterical screaming. She said Ken was an alcoholic and that his drinking made his behavior erratic. She said Ken’s biological father had been an alcoholic, too.
I had learned about Ken being adopted by Fred from a friend of Ken’s. Conni was surprised that I knew about it. She said she had never talked about it with anybody. Over the years, she had heard many of the wise sayings Ken attributed to Fred Venturi. They puzzled her. “Ken’s father was so quiet. He was simple. He said almost nothing. He was overwhelmed by his wife. Whenever I’d hear Ken quote his father, I’d think, That doesn’t sound like him to me.”
Ken’s own language, as Conni remembered it, could be rough. She said he used the most profane language when describing blacks, despite having good relationships with many of the African-American players on the circuit in the 1960s. In the 1970s, when Conni had a boyfriend who was an actor, she said Ken would sometimes ask her, “How’s the little faggot?” Ken despised the acting profession. At the time of their engagement, Conni remembered Ken saying, “You have to choose: me or acting.”
I’m sure her feelings for Ken are far more complex than I could ever know. She never considered remarrying and said that part of her wishes they had stayed married so they could have raised their sons together. But she also said, “I have not shed one tear since Ken died. Isn’t that strange?”
We were sitting at a Starbucks near her house when she said that. Her eyes were clear. She was a striking woman, tall and slender, with long white hair, and she emitted an artistic vibe. Maybe it was her turtleneck-and-vest combo. She looked like somebody you might see at a community theater, either on stage or selling fund-raiser coffee at intermission. It was a warm, windy day in late December, and the shop was filled with the music and decorations of Christmas. Conni was wearing a sweet, heavy department-store perfume. In her candor, she reminded me of Golf Ball. It was like both of them wanted the truth out. So many of the older people we saw on our legends tour—Arnold, Sandy Tatum, Chuck Will, Ball—had a certain what-the-hell quality. They were far more open than most people my own age, and I sadly include myself in that assessment. Conni talked about smoking pot in the 1970s, her health challenges, her struggles with money, motherhood, love, God.
Like Arnold, she had a language that was from a certain place and time. In the early seventies, Conni had a bit role in a Clint Eastwood movie, Magnum Force.
“How’s Ken?” Eastwood asked Conni. Eastwood was a golfer, active in the game.
Conni was surprised he hadn’t heard. “Ken went south,” she said. That is, he had split.
“Sorry,” Eastwood said. He helped Conni as she tried to find her way in the movie business. He arranged for her to have a small role in his next Dirty Harry movie. But Conni was already in her early forties, and her efforts in Hollywood didn’t go far. In time, she returned to Napa and worked as a nanny and answered phones and took other jobs to make ends meet. She was active in local theater. She worked on her relationships with her sons. She showed me pictures of her four grandchildren and one great-grandchild. She was close to them all.
Ken and Conni had met as students at San Jose State. Over sixty years later, Conni was saying that she wished she could have been the wife Ken needed and wanted. But she couldn’t. She could not be that little brown wren.
She never understood Ken’s dispute with Arnold over the 1958 ruling at the Masters. “Do you know that from that Masters until we divorced in 1970, I never heard him mention any sort of rules issue with Arnold? The first I heard about it was when that book came out.
“Arnold and Ken were good friends. They’d go out together. The four of us would go out together. We had dinner on the Saturday night of the ’60 Masters! The Palmers had girls who were the same ages as our sons. Winnie and I went to supermarkets together. We went to Laundromats together. She was one of my very good friends on tour.”
On tour, Conni called Arnold “Arnie.” During summer, the kids would come out, Arnie and Winnie’s daughters, Kenny and Conni’s sons, lots of other children. Nobody on tour traveled with a nanny, but an enterprising mother could find a Saturday-night babysitter now and again.
“I remember one week, we were in—where were we? Maybe Ohio. Timmy was just a baby and Matt was maybe four, so probably summer of ’60. Everybody was staying in the same motel. It was a Saturday morning. Arnold’s door was open. He was sitting on his bed, no shirt, just in his shorts, eating cereal out of a bowl, watching cartoons. Matt went down to his room, climbed up on that bed, and they watched cartoons together.”
What a picture. That was Arnie, sitting on that bed.
Conni told me she had written a condolence note to Arnold after Winnie died and other notes on two or three other occasions. But she had never heard back, and wondered if the letters ever reached him. I said I could get her Arnold’s office address in Bay Hill or Latrobe. No, she said. She wasn’t going down that road again. I said I could hand-deliver a letter to Arnold, if that was something she wanted.
Months later, Conni mailed me a package. It contained a picture of Ken and Conni with Ed Sullivan, taken a day or two before they went to see Hello, Dolly! There was a review she had written of a local theater production of Annie Get Your Gun. There was an eight-by-ten head shot of her with salt-and-pepper hair, wearing a sweater with a shawl collar, all held up by her stage
name in capital letters: CONSTANCE LORD. There was a poem she had written for Matt and Tim in 1979. There was a dazzling black-and-white AP photo of Ken and Conni from the night he won the U.S. Open. The caption reads: “DOUBLE REWARD—Ken Venturi, winner of the National Open, gets a big kiss from his wife, Conni, as he accepts the title-holder’s silver cup after a searing final round on the Washington Congressional Country Club course yesterday.”
This was 1964, when man and wife was still a boilerplate phrase of the American wedding vow. In that context, Ken was the king of golfdom. It was all right there in the snap: the shiny silver cup, the glamorous wife, the dazzling his-and-her smiles. Once that AP photo hit the next day’s papers, the whole world would see: Ken Venturi had it all.
There was one more thing in the mailer: a small pink envelope from Conni, bound for Arnold, his name written in black ink in her feathery eighty-year-old hand.
For years, deep within the culture of a tour life that is long gone and nearly dead, there were people who thought the real reason Ken could not let go of Arnold was because of an affair Arnold and Conni supposedly had. “That was never true,” Conni said. “Never, never. Arnold wasn’t even my type. If it were true, at this stage in my life, I’d admit it. I’d be proud to say that I had an affair with him. Why? Because he was such a gentleman. Not because he was Arnold Palmer. Because he was Arnie.”
As the great thespian said: Inside, we’re all seventeen, with red lips.
I turned seventeen in 1977, the year Tom Watson won the U.S. and British Opens. Big Jack won three times in ’77, and some of the other winners that year were Raymond Floyd, Hale Irwin, Ben Crenshaw, and old Gene Littler, my French teacher’s swing idol. The country might have been in disarray, but American professional golf was doing just fine. If you wanted law and order, all you had to do was look at the tour money list and watch Frank Chirkinian’s Sunday-afternoon golf telecasts on CBS.
Crenshaw particularly resonated with me. His hair had something to do with it. The golf magazines would run pictures of him at impact, his blond hair would be flying everywhere. (My own was a helmet.) When Ben won or was trying to win, Frank Chirkinian would show us pictures of his young wife, the gorgeous Polly Crenshaw. Somehow it got lodged in my head that her family belonged to the Westchester Country Club in New York, where they enjoyed the privileges of wealth and status—poolside phones and that sort of thing. Somewhere I had read that Ben met Polly while playing Westchester, likely at some kind of dinner dance with champagne fountains and a sherbet course after the entrée. I was seventeen, with an imagination that would fill in the blanks.
Crenshaw never realized his collegiate promise. He was supposed to be golf’s next Nicklaus, but that never happened. He did, however, win the Masters twice, the first time in 1984. The next year Herb Wind wrote about him in the New Yorker. The glimpses we plebeians got of our heroes’ lives were different then, and I hung on every word. I remember Wind including a bit about Crenshaw playing in his first USGA event, the 1968 national junior championship at the Country Club in Brookline, and Ben talking about how he would put on a sweater in the New England morning cool. It was all so vivid. I could almost feel the dew on the magazine’s shiny pages.
Later that year, I was working on my first book in Patchogue, at my parents’ house. To pay for my typewriter ribbons and a new (to me) cherrywood desk, among other necessities, I was selling Encyclopaedia Britannica and doing some freelance writing. One magazine piece was about the National Golf Links in Southampton, a course I knew and loved from a few go-rounds as a summer caddie and off-season sneak-on. Nelson Doubleday, then the co-owner of the New York Mets, was a member, and when I somehow got him on the phone to talk about his club he was painfully terse: “It’s a private club, and it’s none of your damned business.” In reporting the story, I had also called Crenshaw, already a noted architecture buff. One day after I returned home from golf at Bellport, my mother said, “Ben Crenshaw called for you.” She had written down his 512 phone number. Austin, Texas. Ben Crenshaw. I called back with tingling fingers. We still had rotary phones.
In the ensuing years, I never spent any significant time with Crenshaw, but whenever I was writing about a course or an architect I’d go to him, and he was always obliging. He was inexhaustible on these subjects.
I wrote the SI game story from the 1999 Ryder Cup at the Country Club, when Ben was the American captain and the U.S. staged an unlikely Sunday comeback. If you know about that event, you know about Crenshaw’s I-got-a-feeling Saturday press conference and the way he kissed the green on Sunday at seventeen. That came when Justin Leonard made a putt from downtown Brookline and the team started celebrating as if they had already won. (They hadn’t.) For an international goodwill team competition, it was way too much. All that was on the captain. He set the tone.
Still, Ben was Ben, and you couldn’t stay mad at him for long. When I introduced him to Christine one year at Augusta he was the model of grace. A gentleman golfer of the old school.
I once took Tom Doak, a golf-course architect who does not lack for opinions, to the Philadelphia Cricket Club to play our A. W. Tillinghast course. We’re all very proud of it, back at the club. Tillinghast was the genius who designed the courses at Winged Foot, Bethpage, and the San Francisco Golf Club. They’re all enduring delights. On the par-four second hole, Doak pushed his shot wildly, and it landed on the roof of an old barn that is part of the clubhouse. In his Confidential Guide to Golf Courses, Doak later complained that the course was “cramped.” I believe that statement to be demonstrably false, although now is likely a good time to trot out an old Herb Wind line: You may sooner insult a man’s wife than his golf club. In any event, Doak wrote in his book, “I casually pushed my approach shot onto the roof of the men’s locker room.” I read his words with burning ears. In my mind, I worked up clever rejoinders. For example: Your shot was lousy, sir, and it is that repurposed barn that gives the hole its old-time charm, as the Green Monster does at Fenway. Something like that.
The next time I saw Ben Crenshaw, he said, “You still at the Cricket Club? I love that course.” This next part came without prompting: “I love that number two hole, the way that old barn comes into play.”
It brought to mind a scene from Annie Hall. Alvy Singer, played by Woody Allen, is standing in a movie line with Annie, and some blowhard behind them is prattling on about the scholar and writer Marshall McLuhan. Alvy suddenly produces the real Professor McLuhan, who tells the man, “You know nothing of my work.” Then Alvy looks at the camera and says, “Boy, if life were only like this.”
Ben doesn’t use e-mail, so to tell him about my legends list and his place on it, I wrote to him in care of his longtime manager, Scott Sayers. I should have just found Ben at a tournament, told him about what I was doing and Mike’s role in it, and asked if we could arrange a visit. But I hadn’t done that. I wrote to Scott, who wrote back telling me that Ben was going to pass. He was wrapping up one book and considering another. Plus, he had too many similar requests. My first rejection, unless you want to count Mickey Wright.
I was thinking of Conni Venturi when I decided to try to track down Ben’s first wife. You may recall what Ball said when he learned that Polly Crenshaw, a native New Yorker, had moved back to Texas to sell real estate in Austin, where Ben lived with his second wife and daughters: “Well I’ll be goddamned.”
• • •
Polly suggested we meet at the Four Seasons hotel in downtown Austin. The hotel’s front door was manned by a small army, the lobby smelled vaguely of burning mesquite, and the lighting was perfect for deal-making. The Texas State Capitol building was five blocks away.
I first met Polly as many of us did, in the mid-1970s over FCC-approved airwaves. She made a strong impression. Tom Watson had recently been in a British Open press tent recalling his win in the 1980 Open at Muirfield, and out of nowhere he mentioned Polly. He was describing how, while celebrating his victory that Sunday night, he and Linda (Tom’s first w
ife) and Ben and Polly (Ben’s first wife) returned to the course, antique equipment and drinks in hand, with “Polly Crenshaw aerating the greens with her four-inch heels.” Is that not the very picture of youthful glamour and half-drunk love?
And here was Polly, in all her late-fifties glory, walking into the hotel restaurant. Hair, jaw, teeth, carriage, looking for all the world like Christie Brinkley’s kid sister, making long strides toward my table. You can be sure nothing like that ever happened to me in Patchogue. Or anywhere else.
Everything I thought I knew was wrong. Polly was not from a rich family, and no one in it had ever belonged to the Westchester Country Club. She met Ben in late August 1974 during the Tuesday practice round of the Westchester Classic. Polly was seventeen and about to start her senior year at Alexander Hamilton High in Elmsford, New York. Her father, Bob Speno, sold insurance. Polly had a twin brother and four other siblings. The three girls shared one bedroom. Everybody worked, Polly as a cashier at a supermarket. A checkout girl, as people said then.
Ben was twenty-two and in his first full year on tour. As a star player at the University of Texas, he was about as famous as a college golfer could be. Then he won his first tournament, the Texas Open, as a pro. He was dashing and talented and the world was at his feet.
“Dad said, ‘Let’s go to the golf tournament,’ ” Polly said. “He loved golf.”
There was more going on than that. Bob Speno had good-looking kids, and he liked showing them off. He knew Polly would attract attention.
“I was wearing a shirt down to here,” Polly said. She made a karate chop about three inches above her naval. “And really short shorts. Cutoffs.”
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