Rozelle

the nation.

  But with it all, Tagliabue’s and Brandt’s assessments were cor-

  rect. Rozelle was, indeed, fading, and, physically, it began to show.

  So why was the former boy wonder’s appetite for the kind of

  challenges that used to sustain him slipping away? For one thing,

  the nfl Management Council, which had been created with full

  authority to negotiate all labor deals, did not ignore Rozelle. Rather, led by Culverhouse, its point man, and abetted by Schramm, who

  ironically was Rozelle’s longtime friend, the council did not even

  consult him.

  Tagliabue, as his closest legal counselor and a close friend, saw it

  happening to the detriment of the league, which is why he would

  not agree to become Rozelle’s successor without a written under-

  standing that he would have legal control of the management coun-

  cil in all its negotiations.

  In that sense Pete Rozelle was no longer the total decision maker

  in football’s 100- yard Garden of Eden. He had won so many wars

  for the owners at a terrific emotional cost to himself, but as new

  owners arrived, that didn’t matter. Some of them decided that the

  members of the old guard, upon whom Rozelle relied for criti-

  cal support for years, were now simply becoming just old guys no

  256

  The Final Battles

  longer in the forefront of management— especially in relation to how it handled labor.

  They did not pause to measure what all these battles on behalf

  of their league had sapped from the commissioner. Inevitably,

  Rozelle now began quietly to count up that emotional cost. It was

  at this juncture that he privately began to speculate on his future

  beyond football.

  He had not lost his passion for the game itself, and he never

  would. But the battles swirling around his continued role as com-

  missioner had now become totally personal.

  Now he had to look at its impact on the personal things that

  mattered most to him. He had always had this “other life” . . . the

  one in which he was his daughter’s loving father, teacher, protec-

  tor, and best friend . . . the one in which his first marriage had

  collapsed . . . the one in which he had for so long been basically a

  man’s man with a select few but fiercely loyal friends . . . the one

  in which he would meet, marry, and love Carrie Cooke Rozelle.

  To understand why, for the first time, he had begun silently to

  think of retirement, you have to forget football for a moment and

  think about the people in that “other world.”

  Rozelle married his first wife, an artist named Jane Coupe, in

  1949. He had met her in Chicago when he was on leave from the

  navy and married her during those salad days in San Francisco.

  Their daughter, Anne Marie, was born nine years later at half-

  time of the Rams’ season opener in 1958.

  Apparently, they had tried for some time to have a child, but

  the prior attempts had resulted in several miscarriages. “She was

  an alcoholic,” the daughter, Anne Marie Bratton, said, “and she

  kept saying it would change . . . everything would be all right if

  she had a child . . . something of her own to love . . . but you know

  that’s never all there is to something like this. She was shy and

  had no self- confidence, and she probably felt inferior. She was an

  alcoholic, but she became violent when she drank, and then there

  were psychological issues that made it far worse.”

  They had married while Myron De Long and Rozelle were work-

  The Final Battles

  257

  ing for usf, and De Long, as one of his closest friends, was then very much aware of the start of Jane’s problems. When describ-ing his close friendship with Rozelle during that time, he would

  only say of her, “Yes, I was there when he married her,” and then

  he immediately changed the subject.

  The drinking had become more intense when Rozelle joined

  Ken Macker’s public relations firm before he became the general

  manager of the Rams. This led to evenings alone for her while he

  entertained clients at dinner, and the relationship worsened. He

  admitted to De Long that the worse it got, the later he chose to

  stay out working.

  “In that pr lifestyle,” Anne Marie explained with a knowledge

  as painful as it was accurate, “all business got done in restaurants

  and bars at all hours of the night. I think I know how it was for

  him, and it went on long after he came back to football. He wor-

  ried about what he would find when he opened the door or what

  he would find when he came back from a business trip.”

  After he became commissioner, he still managed to keep her

  problem more or less a secret. But those closest to him knew, as

  social engagement after social engagement came and went with-

  out her attendance.

  He was desperately trying to keep his balance while walking

  a gossamer tightrope between keeping the nfl on course during

  some of its most difficult times and battling to protect his daughter.

  The former was extremely difficult. The latter at times became

  a nightmarish proposition.

  “It was terrifying,” Anne Marie said in total candor. “As a child

  I grew up with that. I remember days hiding behind chairs in the

  dark, waiting for my dad to come home, and I would run and jump

  into his arms and whisper our prearranged code words for what

  happened. It was ‘She had a lousy day.’ I don’t know how he did it.

  I wouldn’t want to come home to that night after night.”

  The one constant for Anne Marie besides her father was Thelma

  Elkjer, the secretary who had worked for Pete with the Rams and

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  The Final Battles

  came to New York when he became commissioner. Thelma was her refuge, her safe haven, her best friend. They would make paper-clip jewelry in her father’s office. She would often spend week-

  ends with Thelma. She would play with Thelma’s cats. Thelma,

  who never married, was there for her so many times when her

  father could not be.

  “She took me shopping for clothes . . . did so many thing moth-

  ers generally do. She had turned over one of her closets to this doll-

  house we were making. She would buy fabric, and I would come

  over there, and we would cut out little swatches to make wallpa-

  per. I think she was there from the time I could walk and talk.”

  Meanwhile, Jane became even more violent. She was hospital-

  ized several times. She tried rehab and failed.

  Separation and then divorce were inevitable. For Rozelle, the

  custody fight was intense. Jane vigorously contested the divorce,

  but at a time when only a handful of fathers anywhere in the coun-

  try ever won such a battle, Pete Rozelle was granted legal custody

  of his daughter before the divorce was final in 1967.

  Once the split was permanent, Rozelle dated often. He had become,

  after all, one of New York’s most eligible bachelors, although there

  appeared to be nothing serious because raising Anne Marie had

  remained his top priority.

  The one woman he apparently saw the most was an actress

  name
d Caroline McWilliams, who at the time was featured on the

  soap opera Guiding Light. Blair Sabol, the daughter of nfl Films founder Ed Sabol, remembers her well.

  “I met her when my boyfriend and my dad and I went to the

  Copa with them. I saw her a number of times, and I recall think-

  ing that she was safe for him. She was very guarded about their

  relationship because, after all, he was the commissioner. She was

  protective of him, and he dated her for a long time.”

  He had always been what is known as a man’s man, with that

  The Final Battles

  259

  kind of small but closely knit inner circle: Frank Gifford; Jack Landry from Philip Morris; Bill MacPhail, the sports director at

  cbs (which had the first television contract with Rozelle’s nfl);

  Pat Summerall, the old Giants placekicker and by then a radio

  sportscaster in New York; Don Klosterman; Ed Sabol; Herb Sie-

  gel, venture capitalist and Sabol’s brother- in- law; Dave Mahoney,

  chairman of Norton- Simon Corp.; and Bob Tisch.

  Philip Morris was a huge nfl sponsor, and Landry and Rozelle

  shared a love of the racetrack, a love of lunch at 21 (along with sev-

  eral others among them), and a love of practical jokes. One day

  Landry called Pete with a luncheon request. He told him he had

  a cousin he would like to join the group at lunch. She was a nun,

  and it was her first trip to New York. After Pete said sure, Landry

  said, “Well, we’ll all have to watch our language.”

  So they met at noon, and Pete was his usual charming self.

  “How do you like New York, Sister?” he asked, and she said it was

  all very exciting, and they continued to talk. Then, Rozelle felt

  something brush his leg, and it was moving up, and as he spoke

  he realized it was her hand.

  “Dad didn’t know what to think,” Anne Marie said when she told

  the story. “The hand moved higher, and then they all laughed. Obvi-

  ously, she was not a nun, and Landry was the one behind the joke.”

  In some ways Gifford was his closest friend in that there was

  apparently almost nothing they didn’t share with each other about

  their lives.

  Klosterman was the oldest friend, dating back to when he played

  quarterback for Loyola of Los Angeles and Rozelle promoted the

  football fortunes of usf. Their friendship stood the test of time

  but occasionally suffered from geographical distance.

  Landry, Siegel, Mahoney, and Tisch were his closest Manhat-

  tan friends. A love of competitive weekend tennis held most of all

  the above together.

  And then there was Sabol, the Philadelphian who had gone

  from unhappy overcoat salesman to brilliant filmmaker. Like the

  others, he played tennis. But unlike them, he and Rozelle shared

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  The Final Battles

  an intense love of deep- sea fishing. As a sport that pastime has all the qualities of rhubarb. Either you love it or you hate it. There is

  no middle ground. “He loved tennis,” Ed Sabol said.

  He was a good competitor but a lousy player. My brother- in- law Herb

  [Siegel] got him on the board of Chris- Craft, and Pete got a boat. He loved that boat. He liked to take his friends out on it, but that really wasn’t for fishing.

  Fishing was different. For us, fishing was serious business. We

  didn’t talk football; we fished. He needed it to empty his mind. He

  needed that with the pressures he constantly faced.

  Sometime we’d go alone. If the purpose was serious fishing, there

  would never be more than a few others on board. We went to Bimini

  when there was nothing there . . . no place to eat but one restaurant

  and conch fritters, conch stew, conch everything.

  Those trips were vital to him. The closest he ever came to a seri-

  ous commitment to a female during that period was probably Car-

  oline McWilliams. But between the league and single parenting,

  he could not bring himself to do it, and he had yet to meet Carrie.

  Clearly, there was a side to him that only a chosen few knew.

  Beyond the urbane, witty, articulate statesman reflected in his

  public face and the concerned, loving father that Anne Marie saw

  each day, there was yet a third Pete Rozelle.

  Blair Sabol recalls a night at what was then named the Alvin

  Theater on West Fifty- Second Street. This was in 1970, when she

  and her father and Rozelle had tickets to see Company, Stephen Sondheim’s Tony- winning musical. The three often attended

  Broadway shows together, and while none of them knew the

  plot in advance, they did know that Company was a “hot ticket”

  attraction. The show’s lead character was a single man named

  Bobby who was unable to commit to a steady relationship, let

  alone marriage.

  The plot revolves around his thirty- fifth birthday, with five

  married couples who are his best friends and three girlfriends.

  Essentially, Bobby is the one they count on, as in “Don’t worry,

  The Final Battles

  261

  Bob will fix it” or “Bob will know what to do” or “Have I got a girl for you, Bob.”

  He walks out on the party, and when he returns, in front of

  the cakes whose candles are still lit, he sings a song called “Being

  alive”: “Make me confused, mock me with praise, let me be used,

  vary my days, but alone is alone, not alive.”

  “He had such a quick wit, and he loved the theater so much that

  usually he would whisper to me during a show and make me or

  my dad laugh,” Blair Sabol said.

  But this night, he never said a word . . . not during the second act and not as we left the theater. I felt something was going on here, so I said to him, “Pete, you were really into that,” and suddenly it occurred to me that he had so identified with the main character. He thought for

  a moment and then shook his head about that last song, and then he

  said, “That guy up there was so much like me.”

  I never heard him speak that way, nor had my dad, and I remem-

  ber I thought, as a young woman who lived in the city would, that he

  was great and charming, and yet with all the pressure of the league

  and raising his daughter by himself, he just might be desperately alone in New York City.

  When I repeated this story for Anne Marie during our inter-

  view and asked her if she agreed with Blair, she said, “I never heard

  about this before, but, yes, I can understand how my dad must

  have felt that way.”

  That happened in the summer of 1970, after he had just con-

  cluded a pressure- packed, emotionally draining negotiation with

  the nfl Players Association on a new four- year contract. Small

  wonder he confided how deeply Bobby’s final song in Company

  affected him, and small wonder how intensely personal was the

  time he spent as a total man’s man with his friends.

  But in 1973 his world changed forever. It happened in the bar

  at the Hotel Bel- Air in Los Angeles. He was sitting with Landry

  and Summerall on the eve of Super Bowl VII when he first saw

  Carrie Cooke. She was, indeed, a room stopper.

  262 The Final Battles

  Anne Marie heard of that first meeting in the Bel- Air from Landry. “She lit up the room when she walked in,” s
he recalled

  Landry telling her, “and he knew the second they met that Dad was

  smitten. She offered to play tennis with him the next morning.”

  From that moment the romance flourished. Rozelle had made

  up his mind. But in the euphoria of his newfound love, he did not

  handle her introduction to Anne Marie all that well. He was in

  California, and she was there visiting her mother. He called and

  said he was coming to get her.

  “He almost never came to her house to get me. They would meet

  halfway, but now he was coming there, and I was thinking I must

  have done something terrible for him to drive all the way there.

  “He took me back to his suite at the Beverly Hills, and we had

  room service for dinner. He had two scotches and he still didn’t

  explain, and I thought, ‘Oh, my God, what did I do? It must be

  something awful.’”

  Finally, without any warning, he told her, “I’ve met someone

  I want to marry. You’ll like her. Her name is Carrie Cooke. She

  has three sons and a daughter. I’ve bought a house in Westches-

  ter, and you’ll meet them all tomorrow.”

  I went to bed thinking, “What are those kids going to be like?” Until

  now my world had been so small. I don’t know how to take this. In the

  morning they came in all at once. The kids were running around and

  calling my dad “Petey,” and I can’t believe what is happening. This

  whole family knew, and I knew nothing. I’m mad. It’s a done deal,

  and nobody had bothered to discuss it with me.

  But when she first walked into the room, I thought she was the

  most glamorous woman I had ever seen. She was so confident. She

  had been a nurse, a model, a race car driver, and had been married to

  the son of Jack Kent Cooke, who owned the Lakers, the Redskins,

  and the LA Forum. She was incredibly bright and well traveled. She

  appeared to be the ideal female person, and that was intimidating.

  They were married within a year at Herb Siegel’s Manhattan

  apartment.

  The Final Battles

  263

  “In the beginning,” Anne Marie says, “he was so happy.”

  He had always been around great people, but she was bringing him

  into a slice of her world, which was pretty high on the glamour side

  in which he had never been involved. On the plus side, she had a lot

  of wonderful qualities.

  But I think she thought I was insignificant and should not be around