Dodgerland

by Michael Fallon

  Dusty Baker, meanwhile, who grew up in nearby Riverside, married a Grambling University student while he was with the Atlanta Braves. Her name was Harriet, and on the Dodgers Baker became known for setting up teammates with his wife’s friends.21 Flashy Steve Yeager, meanwhile, was known as the driver of much of the team’s late-night carousing. In the early 1970s Yeager had already divorced Brenda, his wife of eight years, and in 1976 he had a marquee wedding to local rock musician Gloria Gaione.22 Even Tom Lasorda, father of two and married to Jo seemingly forever, was widely rumored to have had numerous dalliances, though no confirmation was possible.

  And then there was Steve Garvey. No one was more popular, and no one was more seemingly upright—the namesake of a local junior high school, a fixture in local philanthropic circles, and later a member of the board of trustees of the private Catholic University of San Diego—than Steve Garvey. But as it happened, Garvey was perhaps the most quintessentially Southern Californian when it came to matters of sex—fully embodying the dysfunction and sexual intrigue that increasingly defined local sexuality in those years.

  A first glimpse of what Garvey was really about came in 1981, in a long Q&A interview in Playboy. After touching on the obvious topics—his thoughts on various baseball players and managers, on free agency and his salary situation, on his struggles to be understood by teammates—conversation turned, as is to be expected in a men’s magazine, to sexual issues. “Why is there so much gossip about you and Cyndy,” asked the interviewer, “other women, other men?” In his response Garvey bemoaned the public’s inability to understand that it is “possible to have a friendship with someone of the opposite sex and to enjoy conversation or dinner without sexual involvement. . . . The gossip still amazes me.” The interviewer, perhaps dissatisfied, pressed Garvey: “Have you considered having an affair?” she asked, to which Garvey responded revealingly, “It’s a feeling I’ve had for, gosh, a couple of years now. Anything is possible. But given the relationship I have with my wife and the feelings we have for each other, the odds against it are lopsided. Of course, I’ve had thoughts about having an affair, but, in essence, the actuality has never happened. . . . As far as my marriage is concerned, and my love for my wife, our relationship has never reached a point which has forced me to go out and have a sexual affair with another woman.”23

  Despite Garvey’s stumbling protestations, he was having extramarital sex. And a lot of it for many years—as much, in fact, as any ballplayer who wasn’t claiming to be some sort of moral paragon. Later, after his playing days, Garvey’s unsavory succession of dalliances—and multiple paternity suits—would of course come back to haunt him, destroying his reputation, tarnishing his case for election to the Hall of Fame, and ruining his hopes of entering politics. Though there was no ballplayer more publicly popular in his time than Garvey, and though no one seemed more upright and wholesome, he perfectly embodied all the dysfunctions and unease of L.A.’s sexual mores in those years. “Ain’t talkin’ ’bout love,” indeed.

  22

  Untaxing the Golden Cow

  At a time when City services and City government are under critical scrutiny; at a time when the future is viewed conservatively and our vision of what we might become are [sic] narrowed; at such a time it is fitting that we remember who we are; our humble beginnings; the visionaries who shaped a modern metropolis from semi-arid land; our potential.

  —Tom Bradley, “197: A Time to Reflect,” remarks offered at a celebration of the 197th birthday of Los Angeles

  As spring came to a close in 1978, and the political rhetoric of an election season heated up along with the weather, Mayor Tom Bradley was more convinced than ever that bringing the Olympics back to Los Angeles would be a boon for every one of its residents, and he couldn’t fathom exactly why anyone else would think differently. Still, Bradley had not risen to high office by ignoring the feelings and concerns of his constituents. From nearly the moment his original bid failed in 1974, he knew that there were concerns over how much the city would be obligated to pay for the privilege of hosting the Games. In fact, a wide swath of the city made it clear they didn’t want to be taken to the cleaners by the IOC, as had happened in Munich, Montreal, and in fact to just about every other Olympic venue in the past half century.1

  Because of the troubles of the previous two Olympic Games—the terrorist-marred Games in Munich in 1972 and the financially besieged Games in Montreal in 1976—Bradley had always stressed that the Angeleno vision for the Games was a “spartan” one. That is, Bradley would not construct the type of overelaborate sports facilities and complexes that had stressed Munich in 1972 and bankrupted Montreal in 1976. “Los Angeles [needs] only a velodrome, archery range, and swimming pool,” he said at the time. All other events could be accommodated in existing sports facilities around the city. But that was not all. Bradley proposed a revolutionary change when he insisted to the IOC that the city would actively seek to control costs. Among the most unusual of his cost-saving notions was to construct a swimming complex that would place two temporary aluminum pools at Dodger Stadium for the Games’ seventeen or eighteen days of swimming events.2 The focus, Bradley stressed, would be on the world-class athletes, not on “new buildings and extravagant frills.”3 He also suggested that the city would extensively seek private funding—meaning corporate sponsors—to cover costs. This was, despite the necessity, new and controversial territory.

  Bradley’s ideas for the 1984 Olympics were of course not only counter to long-standing Olympic tradition, but also a direct challenge to the authority of the International Olympic Committee—an organization that tended to take a dim view of such matters. “The I.O.C. sees itself like the College of Cardinals,” said Anton Calleia, “or like the knights of the Round Table. They can be very difficult to deal with.”4 After the close of the Mexico City summit with the IOC on April 12, the Los Angeles team returned home hopeful that, with a few compromises, an Olympic agreement was within reach. Unfortunately, the Los Angeles City Council chose this time to express its own ideas on the matter.

  Just a few days before, while the Los Angeles team was in transit to Mexico, a young and somewhat contrarian council member named Zev Yaroslavsky had published an editorial in the Los Angeles Times. The sharply ambitious Yaroslavsky, who had won his first election at age twenty-six in 1975 over a more established opponent,5 saw opportunity in the Olympic-bid uncertainty. In his commentary the council member asked pointed questions. “Why do we want these games at all? What primarily motivates our bid, and what do we expect to get out of it?” After admitting that he had been naive at first, thinking the bid was “primarily motivated by confidence in our ability to stage a series of athletic events, that our citizens would seize the chance to participate in preparing for and viewing the Games, that this community—including its youth—would invest their energies in constructive recreational and athletic programs that would benefit Los Angeles for generations to come,” over time Yaroslavsky realized that something far less productive and altruistic was happening. “Our bid is slowly becoming a thinly veiled disguise,” wrote Yaroslavsky, “to change the way others see us. Our bid is becoming another attempt to revise our hick-freeway-surfer-laidback image.” The Olympics would do little to alter that, he suggested, adding that the costs were too steep to risk the chance. “We alone will bask in the glory,” he wrote. “[And] we alone will pay the psychological and financial cost.”6

  Toward the end of April the city council’s growing skepticism over the Games had become a distraction in the city’s ongoing negotiations with the IOC. After an April 15 speech by Anton Calleia at a Florida meeting of the U.S. Olympic Committee suggested that an agreement was imminent, three Los Angeles City Council members—Ernani Bernardi, Bob Ronka, and Yaroslavsky—loudly expressed their concern and asked that at least one Olympics “skeptic” be allowed to join the city’s delegation for an upcoming meeting in Athens in May. (Bradley and his team on the city’s Olympics Committee acquiesced by ann
ouncing it would allow Bob Ronka to participate.)

  Another key source of “opposition” in the city government was the city controller at the time, Ira Reiner—though Reiner afterward suggested he was never truly opposed to the Olympics bid. “As Controller, I had to raise concerns about the potential cost to the city of hosting the Olympics,” Reiner said. “I wasn’t against the Games; I was merely against building state-of-the-art facilities at taxpayers’ expense.” In early May the swirling political battle continued, with all sides sending mixed signals and making contradictory statements. On May 4, perhaps feeling pressured by the comments of some city council members, the L.A. Attorney’s Office sent to the IOC a “toughly worded” contract for the 1984 Olympics. The contract, which was different from the one that city officials had received from the IOC in Mexico City, included various protections for the city and legal reservations on potential Olympic costs. These protections were not likely to be favorable to the IOC, and indeed, on May 8, the International Olympic Committee indicated that it found the contract so unacceptable that it would “not even consider it for the time being.”7

  As if matters weren’t looking bleak enough, a public-opinion poll taken on the eve of the local organizers’ trip to Athens revealed that a full 59 percent of Los Angeles County voters were now opposed to hosting the Games. With this as a backdrop even as the city’s Olympic representatives arrived in Athens on May 15, word came to Mayor Bradley that IOC president Lord Killanin was requesting a private meeting with him. The meeting between the two was congenial, with both sides seeming to want a compromise, but then, much to Bradley’s surprise, later that evening at the general meeting the International Olympic Committee announced a public ultimatum to L.A.’s Olympic representatives. In a sternly worded message the IOC insisted that Los Angeles either negotiate from the starting point of the original draft contract from April 11 or lose the Games. (To put some oomph behind the ultimatum, several days before the meeting, on May 11, IOC president Lord Killanin had been quoted in Paris saying he had lined up three potential fallback cities—Mexico City, Munich, and Montreal—in the event that negotiations with Los Angeles broke down.) In Athens, then, in the middle of May, Tom Bradley realized his Olympic dream was turning more and more into a political nightmare.

  Behind the Los Angeles City Council’s sudden intransigence over the Olympics was a development in the spring of 1978 that had seemed to sneak up on Bradley and the city. Though Mayor Bradley started his second term fully aware that he had won a full 59 percent of the vote against a host of opponents—including runner-up Democrat Alan Robbins, who garnered just 28 percent of the vote—Bradley would find a world of trouble from a lesser candidate in the election. This was the unimposing, jowly seventy-five-year-old retired businessman and perennial political candidate Howard Jarvis.

  Howard Arnold Jarvis had been born in 1903 in a small mining town north of Salt Lake City, Utah, called Magna. Raised Mormon, as a young man Jarvis regularly worked with his father, John Ransome Jarvis, a future state supreme court judge, on campaigns for state legislature seats. After Jarvis graduated from Utah State University, he convinced a local bank to loan him the money to buy a struggling small community paper, the Magna Times. And by the time Jarvis was thirty, he had expanded his business to include eleven small newspapers. In 1931, as fate would have it, the ambitious young publisher attended a convention for the Republican Party in Chicago, where he shared a suite with a California district attorney named Earl Warren. According to Jarvis, Warren suggested that he move to the golden land of opportunity. In 1935 Jarvis sold off his papers and took this advice. “When I arrived there,” Jarvis recalled, “I was wet behind the ears, all I had was money.”8 Despite being green to the ways of the Golden State, Jarvis set about making a greater fortune in the wide-open local economy—first purchasing an Oakland chemical firm and later, after relocating to Los Angeles, establishing a chain of home-appliance factories.

  In 1962 successful businessman Jarvis ran in the Republican primary election for the right to run for the U.S. Senate seat held by the incumbent, a liberal Republican named Thomas Kuchel. “I thought Tommy Kuchel voted with the Democrats on every crucial issue,” wrote Jarvis, “and I thought the Republican Party ought to have a Republican U.S. Senator.” Though Kuchel won the primary and was eventually reelected to his Senate seat, the primary run was, for Jarvis, a “fascinating experience.” During the run Jarvis honed a homespun, common-man approach that would serve him well in future political battles. “I was on the road for eighteen months,” Jarvis later wrote.

  I built myself a mobile home with a toilet, a shower, radio, and television. I even had a sound system on top, and inside I had a printing press and typesetting equipment so I could go into a town and print posters and have kids hand out hundreds of them for me. I campaigned all the little towns and cities, some 400 of them. I didn’t think I could do very well in the big cities, but I thought maybe I could get the country vote and beat Kuchel that way, I just had a ball traveling around the state in my van. I slept in it every night.9

  The outsider campaign by Jarvis raised the ire of state Republican Party functionaries, and someone in the party convinced a last-minute ultraconservative, anticommunist candidate, Lloyd Wright, to enter the race as a way of splitting the conservative vote. Kuchel won the primary election handily, followed by Wright in second. Jarvis came in third.

  After the election was over Jarvis, somewhat exhausted, made the fateful decision to retire from both politics and business.

  By then I had several thousand employees, and I was one of the largest industrial employers in Southern California. It was a terrific strain. I had a huge payroll and a lot of problems. . . . A lot of my friends who owned their own businesses and were about the same age I was were dropping dead, and I found myself spending a great deal of time of time going to their funerals. I felt if I didn’t get out, I would probably die in the saddle at my office. It was just too much for one man. So I sold all my companies . . . to some investors from Chicago.10

  Jarvis fully intended to take his earnings—about $750,000 (the equivalent of nearly $6,000,000 today)—and move to the Bahamas, where he would live a long life of leisure, but things didn’t quite turn out as he expected. As fate would have it, in 1962 a group of Jarvis’s neighbors who were struggling under the particular financial pressures of California’s tax codes reached out to him for advice on how to deal with the problem. “I was invited to my first meeting on taxes,” Jarvis said of the episode. “The meeting took place at a neighbor’s home in Los Angeles, with about twenty ordinary people who were concerned about how fast property taxes were rising in California.”11

  The local tax problem was somewhat deep-rooted in the state’s economy. Since the acceleration of emigration to California that followed World War II, land prices had been booming in California, particularly in the Southern California counties of Los Angeles, Orange, and San Diego. “The land boom had resulted in spiraling assessed valuations placed on land,” wrote Jarvis, “creating monumental increases in property taxes, which the politicians were unwilling or unable to do anything about.” Put another way, as the state’s land boom sent the values of homes sky-high, local officials were reluctant to “lower their tax rates so as to keep the total bite relatively stable . . . [instead finding] ways to spend the extra money.”12

  The meeting of Jarvis’s neighbors in 1962 was small and preliminary. While people in the group were sincere in wanting to do something about a tax system they saw as unfair and punitive, there were, according to Jarvis, “no big wheels” in the group. Many of the gathered were older, in their fifties and sixties, and growing increasingly worried about how to manage retirement on a fixed income with such unpredictable tax burdens. Confronted by the sincere concerns of his neighbors, Jarvis was intrigued, but he felt somewhat out of his element. “Up until then,” he wrote later, “I had always been on the political end of things. I knew something about taxes, but I had never had a cha
nce to specialize in them. The people at this meeting asked me to write their bylaws, which I did. Then they wanted me to be their chairman. I said I would do it just long enough to help them get on their feet. [But] the more I got my nose into taxes, the more it interested me. And the first thing you know, it was a full-time deal.”13

  Under Jarvis’s guidance the group developed a set of principles to direct their efforts. The first principle was primary: that “property taxes in California should be fair and should be applied to all the property in California that should be taxed.” In California, the group noted, thousands of taxable acres were off the tax rolls either because they were owned by corporations that didn’t pay or because they were owned by sham charitable trusts created for the sole purpose of gaining a tax break. Second, the group “wanted taxes to be equal for everybody. . . . We felt that if two people had houses just alike, like tract houses, and the owner on the right side of the street paid $3,000 a year in taxes and the owner on the left side of the street paid $1,000 a year in taxes, they weren’t being treated equally.” Because of the vagaries of the property tax codes, this scenario was common in California—especially when houses sold and were reassessed based on inflated house prices, or when assessors simply picked and chose which houses they wanted to reassess. Finally, and most important, the group wanted the tax system to “be within the ability of the people who were taxed to pay for it.”14 In other words, they wanted to protect the elderly, young people, and any middle- and lower-class home owners who might not be able to afford their homes because the property tax assessment was too dear.