I sat between my mother and Gillian’s mother and wept as the somber sounds of Pachelbel’s Canon in D played before the church’s pastor, Tom Brown, gave his sermon. I was unable to stifle my tears during the proceedings in which the eulogies were delivered by my sister, Ginny Clements, the Long Beach State president Dr. Robert Maxson, my longtime sportswriting pal dating back to Fresno State Larry Stewart, the colorful boxing publicist Bill “Bozo” Caplan, the legendary voluptuary and boxing personality Johnny Ortiz and my radio partner, Joe McDonnell.
They all gave moving tributes to Gillian, and all related the dramatic impact she had made on my life, bringing a stability and happiness to it that had been missing when I was a single guy pursuing the dark temptations.
With Pachelbel’s classic and then Gillian’s favorite song—the French version of “La Mer” by Charles Trenet—playing in the background, many of the attendees afterward filed past me offering their solemn sympathies. I was in such a disoriented, tearful state during this ritual that I have no recollection of the identities of those dozens of people with whom I shook hands and warmly embraced. It wasn’t until ten years later when I finally read the funeral register that I discovered the names of countless people whom I didn’t realize were in attendance.
Gillian was cremated, and her remains were put in two urns—one that I would possess and the other that her mother would take back to England. Her ashes in her homeland later were spread in the Lake District, where Gillian and her family often vacationed.
I kept the urn in the bedroom that Gillian had converted into her office. After accompanying Gillian’s mother to Hartlepool, where I remained for a few days, I flew back to Los Angeles and remained away from my two jobs for another week.
A strange development occurred early one evening a couple days after I had returned while I was lying in my bed reading a book. I heard heavy breathing coming out of the guest bedroom where I kept Gillian’s urn and where Gillian had her office. I listened for a few minutes, and it seemed to get louder. The door to the room was shut, and I quietly walked up to it and pressed my ear against it to listen.
Now, I’m not a guy who ever has believed in ghosts, UFOs, astrology, chiromancy, sorcery, mesmerism or any kind of mystical hocus-pocus. But that noise in that room was coming from someone, so I gingerly walked back into my bedroom and called up one of my neighbors, Mike Davis, a big, strong guy inclined to settle disputes with his fists. I told him I thought someone was in my guest bedroom—that perhaps a homeless person had snuck into my home.
“I think there’s someone sleeping in there,” I told him.
Davis immediately came over with another neighbor, Doug Cook, and we quickly opened the door. The room was empty, and the sound of heavy breathing had suddenly disappeared.
To this day, I have no idea what created that noise, but I know I wasn’t imagining it.
There was a distinct sound emanating from that room where Gillian spent so much time studying.
Sunni Webber believes it was a spiritual miracle of faith meant for my ears.
“That was the Lord’s way through Gillian to let you know that she was very much alive and that everything was good,” she explained.
I have no idea what it was, just that I know what I heard remains mystical to me, much like it’s all mystical to me how Gillian came out of nowhere to make such a staggering imprint on my life, an archangel coming down from the firmament to bring a divine period of ecstasy and serenity into it.
Epilogue
I look back now, and it’s all like a grainy film with infinite vignettes. I no longer write sports after forty-six years of doing so. Death has silenced so many of the people I chronicled. Others are quietly living out their lives in the oblivion of retirement. Others are stalked by infirmities. Others still are on the sporting stage.
Gillian’s mother now lives in a retirement home in Hartlepool. Her father passed away in 2004. Her sister and brother-in-law still work as radiologists. Her niece and nephew are both attending English university medical schools to become doctors.
The McDonnell-Douglas Show, which came to an end in June 2005 when it was broken up by my latest firing, had yet another incarnation in March 2012, this time on the Internet out of a famous sports tavern in the Belmont Shore district of Long Beach called Legends. Joe and I did it a mere two hours a day—2:00 to 4:00 p.m.—and there was no pressure, no censors, no meddlesome program directors, no large audience, no big paychecks, no PR firms angling to get clients on the show. It was a lot of fun, but alas, the plug was pulled after four months for financial reasons.
It’s all now so different for me, but I don’t miss the tumult and the shouting and the commotion and the stress of dealing with athletes and attending games and worrying about deadlines. The newspaper business I left wasn’t what it was when I started, and when I started there was no Internet around mocking its antiquity; there were no layoffs, no widespread speculation about its imminent demise, no accountants disguised as publishers rendering mindless decisions that will only hasten such a dark destiny.
I can live nicely with the memories that often flow through me as I lie awake in bed during the darkness of night, when all the yesterdays come alive before sleep overtakes me.
I can think of that little boy growing up in the tiny farming community of Fowler in the middle of California’s fertile and bleak San Joaquin Valley and dreaming about becoming a Major League Baseball player and then dreaming about becoming a sportswriter for a metropolitan newspaper traveling around the country with athletic teams and covering all the major events of the day, which, incredibly, I wound up doing beyond my wildest imaginings.
I can think of Chick Hearn, the most entertaining play-by-play announcer I’ve ever heard, dispensing his comical asides and critical insights during his descriptive narrations of Lakers games, and recall with fondness those times after games at The Forum when I’d join him in the privacy of his closed-door office for a few shots of vodka before he’d venture out into the nearby press lounge to hold court with his fawning admirers.
I can think of all those seasons throughout the 1970s of my chronicling the Los Angeles Rams, and how their owner, Carroll Rosenbloom, once sent me a pair of Gucci blue suede shoes when I told him how much I liked the ones he wore, and how he later got so mad at me for my persistent criticism of him in the Herald Examiner for his firing a great coach, George Allen, after two exhibition games in the summer of 1978 that he came down to the Herald Examiner building with his son Steve and met with the newspaper’s editor, James Bellows, and publisher, Francis Dale, and Melvin Durslag and me in a vain attempt to muzzle Durslag and me.
I can think of Rosenbloom’s widow—she remarried and became known as Georgia Frontiere—having me up to her Bel Air mansion one afternoon and relating to me during an interview how she had a nightly séance with her late husband and how she later shifted the Rams to St. Louis for financial enhancement in a move that made her easily the most despised figure in Los Angeles sports history.
I can think of my first wife, M, a decent woman despite her zealous possessiveness, losing her temper so often with me for breaking curfew in a marriage that was destined to fail from the start because of my rascality and restlessness.
I can think of the obstreperous sportscaster Howard Cosell once phoning the Herald Examiner taking loud umbrage about something I had written about him and then many years later screaming over the phone at me when I sought to have him come on the McDonnell-Douglas Show, saying, “Don’t you realize, I’m dying!”
Los Angeles Rams owner Georgia Frontiere and Doug enjoy a moment prior to a Rams game.
I can think of my mom and how she lovingly tended to her mother and then my father’s mother when they were in their dotages and lived in our home throughout my childhood, and how she would routinely make the 460-mile round-trip drive to Long Beach when I needed assistance and how she doted on me to the end of her ninety-eight years.
I can think of my father, who wen
t to work six days a week into his mid-eighties, imparting wise counsel and emphasizing the importance of my having a family—and, oh, why didn’t I listen to this honest, hardworking man instead of blithely ignoring him all those years.
I can think of all the fights I saw in person, more than five thousand, and never will forget the ones in which four ill-starred men—Jimmy Garcia, Cleveland Denny, Johnny Owen and Kiko Bejines—wound up losing their lives from the beatings they endured in a sport of sanctioned violence that I no longer enjoy.
I can think of being in that Crystal Palace train station in South London on a rainy day, seated on a bench with this unknown young woman next to me who would become an eternal part of my soul.
I can think of being in the Hancock Park home of Muhammad Ali when he resided in LA, and his cracking jokes and doing magic tricks and evincing the charisma that was a vibrant part of his persona before Parkinson’s Syndrome took it all away.
I can think of the doyenne of Los Angeles boxing, Aileen Eaton, enlisting her private hairstylist to shape up my then lengthy locks, which Ms. Eaton found too disheveled, and who was further ahead of the feminist curve than this small, strong, smart, dynamic lady who promoted so many fistic classics at the Olympic Auditorium at Eighteenth and Grand near downtown LA?
I can think of that time I came across Mike Tyson and his bodyguard, the late James Anderson, in a hallway at the Las Vegas Hilton, and I went into a shadow boxing pose and unfurled a left hook in the direction of Tyson, who shook his head in mock contempt and said, “I’d knock your fucking head off.”
I can think of Johnny Ortiz and all the ladies melting in the presence of his light-hearted banter, his inexhaustible supply of titillating tales and all the drinks that flowed strongly when he was mixing them at the Stardust Lounge and Lancer Lounge in Downey and the Casting Office in North Hollywood and the Oyster House in Studio City and the City Slicker in West Los Angeles.
I can think of the great coach John Wooden angrily referring to me at a basketball media luncheon as “being an embarrassment to the Grantland Rice school of sportswriting” for mocking his UCLA team’s early season non-conference schedule at the start of the 1971–72 season and his reaching me at the Herald Examiner the next day on the phone and offering an apology, much to my sheepishness.
Hector “Macho” Camacho offers a pose to illustrate his nickname between Doug (left) and trainer Jimmy Montoya (right) at a gym in the city of Bell.
I can think of having dinner one evening at the Redwood Inn in downtown Los Angeles with the fight promoter Don Fraser and the legendary mobster Mickey Cohen—he was portrayed graphically by Harvey Keitel in Bugsy—and recall Cohen discussing his brief incarceration at Alcatraz and the bookmaking operation he once had in Fresno.
I can think of all the characters I’ve met across the years, and I’m not sure anyone picks up more tabs than bookmakers, or has more fun while working than ticket scalpers, or scores on more ladies than bartenders, or comes up with more exotic excuses for not paying their debts than degenerate gamblers or turns on their coaches and managers faster during bad times than athletes.
I can think of brazenly challenging an eighteen-year-old political refugee from Czechoslovakia named Martina Navratilova to a game of ping-pong at the Beverly Hills home of her then agent, Fred Barman, in 1975, and how she displayed the skills that would result in her becoming a nine-time Wimbledon tennis champion by humiliating me so thoroughly—I didn’t score a point in three games—that the mauling was the theme of the Herald Examiner story I wrote on her.
I can think of being in the Executive Lounge of the Berlin Hilton with Tom Kelley one evening a couple years after Gillian’s death when a nice couple told me they were from Lisbon, Portugal, and my immediately bursting out of the room in tears in a reaction I had often in those days when grief overcame me when reminded of places where Gillian and I had memorable times together.
I can think of those chilling moments I avoided death and cringe at the thought of drag-racing my father’s 1959 Bonneville Pontiac 125 miles an hour in the Fowler countryside when I had no idea about mortality at age sixteen, or zipping down the 605 Freeway at 135 miles an hour one late evening in a lady friend’s Porsche when I was drunk and old enough to know I was daring death or incarceration.
I can think of the Hilton Hotel security personnel coming up to my booth in the hotel’s main ballroom at the Victor Awards proceedings and threatening to boot me and my three guests, fight promoter Don King, tennis hustler Bobby Riggs and PR guy Bill “Bozo” Caplan, from the premises for the loud commotion we were creating (actually, King and Riggs were the miscreants in that embarrassing situation).
I can think of my pal Van Barbieri, a chivalrous man of honor with whom I had lunch that fateful day when I decided to fly to London and had so much fun with across the years, dying too young and too quickly in the summer of 2012 from pancreatic cancer.
I can think of my dear sister, Ginny Clements, who knows personal tragedy, always being there for me and for her own family, for our parents and for her large group of friends, in periods of need and distress.
I can think of the melancholic times I’ve gone out to Forest Lawn Cemetery in Cypress where I had Gillian’s urn buried near a beautiful oak tree and how serene the setting is for “My Loving Brit Wife,” the epitaph inscribed on her bronze gravestone that reflects my feelings for a person who brought so much joy to all of us whose glad destiny it was to have crossed her sacred path.
About the Author
A former sportswriter and columnist for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner from 1968 until its demise in 1989, Doug Krikorian became the sports columnist for the Long Beach Press-Telegram for two more decades. He has been a sports radio talk show host for Los Angeles radio stations and ESPN Radio and a sports commentator on LA television.
Visit us at
www.historypress.net
Between the Bylines Page 23