In time, once the details of the crime got out, the sense of devastation that Polanski experienced spread far and wide across Los Angeles, shattering the illusion of California as a modern-day paradise. “After Sharon was murdered,” said Andrew Braunsberg, “everybody was totally freaked out. It was a very weird time. The highest paranoia. The transition of this hippie kind of existence in L.A. to this brutal awakening of an understanding that these kinds of absolutely horrible events can happen. . . . It changed everything overnight in L.A.” Gene Gutowski, meanwhile, a film-producer colleague of Polanski, put it more succinctly. “It was the end of a fairy tale,” Gutowski said, “for Roman, for everybody.”5 In retrospect, as Time suggested in 1977, it was obvious that the wild and wholly open ways of Hollywood would eventually prove problematic and that the illusion of a Southern Californian paradise, where profligate and reckless behavior was its own reward, would eventually unravel.
Whatever one thought of the killings on Cielo Drive, almost no one in the Los Angeles area was left unaffected. “On August 9, 1969,” wrote Joan Didion at the end of the 1970s, “I was sitting in the shallow end of my sister-in-law’s swimming pool in Beverly Hills when she received a telephone call from a friend who had just heard about the murders at Sharon Tate Polanski’s house on Cielo Drive. The phone rang many times during the next hour. These early reports were garbled and contradictory. One caller would say hoods, the next would say chains. There were twenty dead, no, twelve, ten, eighteen. Black masses were imagined, and bad trips blamed. I remembered all of the day’s misinformation very clearly, and I also remember this, and wish I did not: I remember that no one was surprised.”6 Tom Bradley was one of those most deeply affected by that day, as he had a personal connection to the murders. Earlier in the spring of that year, during his first attempt to unseat corrupt incumbent mayor Sam Yorty, then council member Bradley had gotten to know Abigail Folger when the young heiress began volunteering for, and contributing to, Bradley’s mayoral campaign. At the time Folger, who was described by colleagues as outgoing and capable, if a bit eccentric, had come to realize how little effect she was having on the city’s massive social problems. The suffering she was seeing daily in her job in the Welfare Department was getting under her skin, and so she pinned her hopes for change on Bradley. When Bradley became the victim of a smear campaign and lost the election to Yorty, Folger grew even more disillusioned and withdrew somewhat from public life. Ironically, this was how she and the struggling screenwriter Frykowski agreed to house-sit for Polanski, and take care of his pregnant wife’s needs, in the lead-up to the August murders.
As a city council member at the time, and twenty-one-year veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department, Bradley, of course, had a long-standing concern about the rapidly rising violent crime rates in his city throughout the 1960s.7 Still, while he was intensely concerned about the problem, he had a more nuanced understanding of its full nature. “There were many voices [in the city] calling for stiffer penalties and tougher sentences,” write Bradley biographers J. Gregory Payne and Scott Ratzan. “As a former police officer, Bradley agreed that steps had to be taken in that direction.”8 But, Bradley knew, the shallow, quick-fix solutions proposed by politicians completely misunderstood the root causes of the problem.
Seeing the complex city from his vantage point as its chief administrator, Bradley viewed L.A.’s crime problem as multifaceted and immune to simplistic policy fixes. Confined to a life of squalor and broken homes in the poorest parts of town, young Angelenos of color in general lacked resources, family support, even the access to education that could pull them out of their dire situation. With few available ways to obtain clothes and food, many young people turned to petty crime. After that it was only a matter of time before the crimes grew more serious. “Bradley was well aware of the syndrome,” suggest Payne and Ratzan. “Many of those he had played with as a kid had gone down the same road, ending up with nothing but a jail record.”9 The fact that Bradley witnessed the struggles against criminality up close with his daughter—whose problems with drugs, petty crime, and incarceration continued—also gave him an intimate understanding of both the personal tragedy and the abiding seriousness of the problem of crime in Los Angeles.
With the systemic cards stacked against a wide array of the region’s young people, Bradley knew that any long-term solution to the problem of crime would necessarily require a more dynamic and multitier effort. In 1977, Bradley noted, roughly one out of every two black and Hispanic youths in Los Angeles was unemployed. Therefore, shortly after his reelection to the mayor’s office in that year’s election, Bradley spearheaded a program called Operation HEAVY, which employed the resources of city hall, the police department, and the Los Angeles Unified School District to provide juveniles offenders with counseling, recreational opportunities, job training, and job placement as an alternative to a life in the criminal justice system. Although Bradley had no illusions that his program alone would solve one of his city’s most entrenched problems, he did consider it a good first step. Bradley also helped develop a summer youth program, SPEEDY, that provided jobs to tens of thousands of disadvantaged students during the summer of 1977. These two initial efforts were widely praised across the city, even by factions that were politically opposed to the mayor. For instance, longtime Republican political operative Francis Dale, who had recently served on the Committee to Re-Elect Richard Nixon, praised Bradley’s programs, saying they “contributed to the city’s most valuable resource—its youth—[and] are exactly what every city across American should be doing more of.”10
Although his programs to address the root causes of youth crime in L.A. gained accolades, Mayor Bradley knew there was much more that needed to be done. Despite that he worked so hard—nearly sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, so that he barely slept and almost never spent a moment of private time with his family11—and despite that he maintained a calm and upright public image while in office, Bradley was privately distraught about the social ills that plagued his city. As a result he increased his resolve regarding bringing the Olympics back to Los Angeles. In 1974, with Bradley’s direction, Los Angeles had submitted a fairly strong bid to host the Summer Olympic Games in 1980. It was only one year into Bradley’s first term in office, and already he was convinced that the spectacle of the Games would help inspire the city and its young even as it made Los Angeles a leading city of international trade and travel—an American gateway to the so-called Pacific Rim. Although L.A. lost the bid for the 1980 Olympic Games (to Moscow), Bradley was not surprised. After the decision was made, however, the atmosphere was reportedly quite cordial on all sides, and representatives of Los Angeles’s Olympics bid returned home with the sense that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) would welcome a future bid by the city. According to John Argue, the president of the Southern California Committee for the Olympic Games, representatives of the IOC “liked Bradley. . . . He was sincere, and has a real spirit that reflects the Olympics. He just hit it off with them from the very beginning.”12 As a result Bradley immediately began working behind the scenes to build support for his planned bid for the 1984 Games.
In 1977, however, with the public increasingly focused on the city’s growing internal problems, an Olympics bid began to seem like anything but a wise public policy decision. To many Angelenos, in fact, the Olympic Games likely would mean a host of additional problems for the city. For one, there were the costs to host the Games, which had been skyrocketing in recent years—especially in the Summer Games that had occurred in 1976. No one wanted to saddle Los Angeles with crushing debt simply for the privilege of hosting two weeks of sporting events. Additionally, with local crime rates rising, many worried about the potential for crime or violence to mar the Games. “There were rumors,” write Payne and Ratzan, “that the Olympics would result in an influx of terrorists coming to Los Angeles, and fears of a repeat of the 1972 Munich tragedy. . . . There were even those who warned of national security threats—waves o
f Communists infiltrating Southern California and fanning out throughout the United States.” Despite the mayor’s strong belief in the eventual benefits of bringing the Olympics back to L.A., a growing chorus of critics and policy makers became increasingly wary of the real benefit of the Games. “Even on the Mayor’s own staff,” said Anton Calleia, who was Bradley’s budget director at the time, “there were those who strongly opposed Bradley pursuing the Games, [who] thought it was politically a very damaging issue.”13 Bradley, however, resisted the counsel of his advisers and pressed on to realize his vision.
The people of Los Angeles weren’t the only ones wary of holding the Olympic Games. On November 1, 1977, the day after the application deadline for bids for the 1984 Olympic Games had passed, the International Olympic Committee announced it had received a bid from just one candidate for the Games—Los Angeles. (The city of Teheran, in Iran, was said to be pursuing submitting a bid, but in the end did not actually complete one.) To the media IOC executive director Monique Berlioux noted that this marked the first time since the start of the modern Olympics movement that only one city had applied to hold the Games. She also noted, much to the relief of Mayor Bradley, that all that remained was for the representatives of L.A.’s Olympics committee to submit answers to an IOC questionnaire. Assuming the city’s responses were adequate, a vote by the IOC to approve the bid was likely.
As fate would have it, however, the road to a second Los Angeles Olympic Games, something that only two previous cities—London and Paris—could boast of, would see many more roadblocks.
That the first of these roadblocks involved another wide-ranging and far-reaching crime scare only reinforces the growing sensitivity of Angelenos toward their culture of violent crime. On October 18, 1977, just a few weeks before Los Angeles submitted the only bid for the 1984 Summer Olympics, a nineteen-year-old woman named Yolanda Washington, who worked as a waitress but also moonlighted as a prostitute in Hollywood, was found dead near the Forest Lawn Cemetery in the Hollywood Hills. The victim’s body had visible strangulation marks around the neck and rope burns on her wrists and ankles. Police initially chalked the murder up to a rape gone wrong, but on November 1 police discovered another body in La Crescenta, just north of downtown. Eventually identified as fifteen-year-old Judith Lynn Miller, a runaway who had turned to prostitution, her killing was markedly similar to that of Yolanda Washington. Miller had been abducted in Hollywood, raped, strangled, bound, then dumped, most likely from a car, in a quiet hillside residential area of the city.
Over the next four weeks six similar murder scenes were discovered, each following the same pattern: victims were captured somehow, raped or tortured in some way, strangled, and dumped on a hillside. On November 23 the decomposed body of twenty-eight-year-old aspiring actress Jane King was found near Griffith Park. By now law enforcement officials had established a task force to catch the ostensible serial murderer—or murderers, as officials were convinced this was the work of at least two killers—whom they dubbed the “Hillside Strangler.” By early December, then, with officials in Los Angeles offering one hundred thousand dollars for information leading to an arrest, the word was out. Fear and paranoia settled over the city.
It’s somewhat difficult today to imagine exactly how Angelenos felt in late 1977 and early 1978—or how New Yorkers felt a year earlier about the Son of Sam killings, or Bostonians felt in the early 1960s about the Boston Strangler. After all, Americans in the twenty-first century have become inured to such stories, living as we do with a hyperawareness of the potential for violence, inundated as we are with a constant flood of death and murder in movies, on TV, on the Internet, and in all forms of American popular entertainment. In the 1970s movies like Star Wars, Jaws, and other gaudy blockbusters were breaking new ground in depicting cartoonlike, highly desensitizing images of violence. In the decades that followed, after several decades of gory “slasher” films, high body-count action movies, zombie gore fests, and news coverage of serial murderers like John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Ted Bundy, violence seems commonplace. But in late 1977 and early 1978, it wasn’t. Suddenly, everyone in California was acutely aware that a vicious serial killer was loose in the city, claiming victims in nearly every corner of the region—in La Crescenta, Glendale, Hollywood, Angeles Crest, even the hills near Dodger Stadium. No place in the area seemed safe.
The Hillside Strangler’s activities tailed off early in 1978. The last documented murder in L.A., the tenth over the course of four months dating back to October 17, was discovered in Angeles Crest on February 16. Though it may have been the last official “Hillside” strangling, the mounting concern and near hysteria forced Mayor Bradley to make a public statement on crime. And this in turn would lead to a fateful decision. On March 28, 1978, Bradley appointed a new chief of its police department, Darryl Gates, a veteran police investigator who had led the search for the Manson Family, formed the city’s first special weapons and tactics (SWAT) unit, and innovated tough countermeasures against the city’s growing street gangs. Bradley chose Gates to help bolster the mayor’s reputation as tough on crime. Little did either man know what actually lay in store for him and the city in the years to come.
18
The Redemption of Rick Monday
Do you remember the thrill you had the first time you were actually on the road to Disneyland? Going to the Dodgers was like going to Disneyland for me.
—Rick Monday
The Dodgers’ opening spring-training game in 1978, ironically enough, was against the New York Yankees in Fort Lauderdale. On March 10 the Dodgers took the cold and windy night game, 7–3. The team’s pitchers held Yankee slugger Reggie Jackson to a single in his two at bats and the rest of the New York lineup to just four other hits. The Dodgers, meanwhile, were sparked by Ron Cey’s home run and three RBIs and Rick Monday’s two hits, including a solo moon shot to right-center field.
Despite this slight vindication of the disappointment of the team’s most recent game—back on October 18 in the World Series—the atmosphere in the Dodger camp was different this year. In 1977 Lasorda had instructed the team’s veterans to play, eat, work out, and take breaks together for much of spring training. In 1978 he held many Dodger regulars in reserve. It may have been Lasorda’s intention to ease the veterans slowly back into the game, and to reduce injuries this season, but it may also have been an indication of a new sense of confidence in the Dodger camp this year. The team had less to prove this year after their World Series appearance. They could focus on other, more pressing, concerns.
After their opening exhibition-season win, the Dodgers dropped four straight games—14–3 and 5–2 against the Atlanta Braves on March 11 and 12, 7–5 against the Twins on March 13, and 7–2 against the Montreal Expos on March 14. The Minnesota game, ironically, was marred by complaints that the Dodgers had failed to field a serious lineup. “Why the hell do we schedule all these exhibition games if the players don’t need them?” said a Twins team official, peeved that few Dodger regulars appeared in the game. “We spent a lot of money advertising the appearance of the National League champions and this is what we get for it. I’m disgusted.” Lasorda shrugged off the complaints. “You hear the same complaints every spring. It’s inevitable. My decision last spring to keep our eight players together proved to be a success for various reasons. I play them every other day and I leave them the option of asking to play on the days when they normally wouldn’t. . . . You can’t accommodate everybody. What’s wrong with Rhoden, Hooton, Davalillo, and Burke? Those guys all played in the World Series last year.” (In addition, an anonymous Dodger official was harshly dismissive: “I don’t think anyone would know the difference even if Minnesota didn’t bring its regulars.”)1
On March 15 the team’s record stood at 1-4, which was a far cry from the full-bore attack of the season before—though of course both records meant virtually nothing. Beyond the team’s record, though, Lasorda had his worries. Reggie Smith had sat out a couple of games
nursing a sore back. Without Smith the Dodger outfield was in rough shape. Willie Crawford had reported to camp at a heavy 240 pounds, quickly earning the nickname “Whale” from Lasorda. And although the veteran reduced his weight to 221 pounds in just a few short weeks, at the plate he was showing few signs of his former effectiveness. “He’s worked very hard,” said Lasorda of Crawford. “He’s been in uniform from seven in the morning to five at night. In fact, he’s worked too hard. He’s made himself weak. He’s not swinging the bat the way he should be. I told him to take it easy, that he doesn’t have to do it overnight, that I want him ready in April, not mid-March.”2 Others, such as Ron Cey, Dusty Baker, and Steve Yeager, had thus far been surprisingly inept at the plate. And the Dodgers’ defensive play was uncharacteristically sloppy as well, with the team recording seventeen errors in its first nine games.
One clear bright spot in the midst of the up-and-down play, however, was none other than last season’s biggest disappointment—Rick Monday. Monday entered the preseason with a lot to prove. In the first game of the exhibition season against the Yankees, Monday had hit a long home run close to the deepest part of the ballpark in Fort Lauderdale. “The home run off Figueroa relieved a lot more of the frustration from a season in which I had not been able to perform anywhere close to what I had hoped to,” said Monday, who had come to camp fit and lean at 206 pounds. “Figueroa had pitched winter ball and I had kind of expected to be blown away, especially considering that the first game of spring was being played at night under bad lights . . . The injury is behind me. I have not had any problem, discomfort or stiffness. I’ve been running around like a kid.”3
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