28.Ross Newhan, “Yeager Has Bigger Year in Sight,” Los Angeles Times, March 3, 1978.
29.Ross Newhan, “Spring Hopes Eternal for Pair,” Los Angeles Times, March 12, 1978; “Insiders Say,” The Sporting News, February 11, 1978; Newhan, “Spring Hopes Eternal.”
30.Ross Newhan, “No. 1 Reggie? Just Ask Smith,” Los Angeles Times, March 22, 1978.
31.Newhan, “Spring Hopes Eternal.”
32.Ross Newhan, “Their Days as Dodger Players Are Numbered,” Los Angeles Times, March 4, 1978.
17. Paradise Defiled
1.“Whatever Happened to California?”; Michael Davie, California: The Vanishing Dream (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1972), 250.
2.“Whatever Happened to California?”
3.His mother had been taken to Auschwitz and died there.
4.Charles “Tex” Watson and Chaplain Ray, Will You Die for Me? The Man Who Killed for Manson Tells His Own Story (Grand Rapids MI: Fleming H. Revell, 1978), 136.
5.Marina Zenovich, dir., Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired (Antidote Films, 2008).
6.Joan Didion, The White Album (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), 42.
7.According to the Public Policy Institute of California, Los Angeles’s crime rates closely mirrored overall state statistics in the 1960s. The rate of violent crime more than doubled between 1960 and 1970—from 239 incidents to 475 incidents, respectively, per one hundred thousand residents. Most other sorts of crimes—including rape, murder, robbery, assault, against property, and so on—followed the same pattern over the decade. “California Crime Rates, 1960–2012,” Disaster Center, 2014, http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/cacrime.htm.
8.Payne and Ratzan, Tom Bradley, 205.
9.Payne and Ratzan, Tom Bradley, 205.
10.Payne and Ratzan, Tom Bradley, 206.
11.Famously, while in office Bradley reserved only three days a year for his wife—her birthday, his birthday, and the Academy Awards.
12.Payne and Ratzan, Tom Bradley, 215.
13.Payne and Ratzan, Tom Bradley, 215.
18. The Redemption of Rick Monday
1.Ross Newhan, “Dodgers Use Jayvees and Twins Don’t Like It,” Los Angeles Times, March 14, 1978.
2.Newhan, “No. 1 Reggie?” The Dodgers would release the thirty-one-year-old Crawford at the end of the spring training after he hit just .192 in twenty-six at bats.
3.Ross Newhan, “Monday Leaves Troubles behind Him,” Los Angeles Times, March 15, 1978.
4.Ross Newhan, “OK, Anderson Tells the Dodgers, Let’s See You Do It Again,” Los Angeles Times, March 21, 1978. Rose, helpfully enough, assessed each member of the Dodgers’ lineup, somewhat echoing the concerns of the Dodgers’ own management. “We know about Steve Garvey’s consistency. We know Ron Cey is among the top five in RBI consistency. What we don’t know is if people like Dusty Baker and Reggie Smith and Steve Yeager can repeat the years they had in 1977.”
5.Ross Newhan, “Campanis Says Pitching Gives Dodgers Edge,” Los Angeles Times, March 27, 1978.
6.Ross Newhan, “The ‘Voice’ of Baseball Coming in Loud and Clear,” Los Angeles Times, March 26, 1978.
7.Newhan, “Pitching Gives Dodgers Edge.”
8.Ross Newhan, “Reggie Smith Upset, Hurt; Game Rained Out,” Los Angeles Times, April 1, 1978.
9.Newhan, “Reggie Smith Upset.”
10.Ross Newhan, “Dodger Mood: Color It Blue,” Los Angeles Times, April 6, 1978.
11.Newhan, “Dodger Mood Blue”; “Dodger Notes,” Los Angeles Times, April 7, 1978.
12.Ross Newhan, “Little D Starts Measuring Up to Big D Tonight,” Los Angeles Times, April 7, 1978.
13.Ross Newhan, “Dodgers Unload Their Monday Punch, 13–4,” Los Angeles Times, April 8, 1978.
14.“Dodger Notes,” Los Angeles Times, April 8, 1978.
15.Ross Newhan, “Dodgers Hit by Everything but the Dome,” Los Angeles Times, April 13, 1978.
19. Every Day We Pay the Price
1.Ross Newhan, “Dodgers Blast Both Seaver and Morgan,” Los Angeles Times, April 27, 1978.
2.Newhan, “Dodgers Blast Seaver and Morgan.”
3.Ross Newhan, “A Win over Dodgers Eases Buckner’s Pain,” Los Angeles Times, May 3, 1978. Buckner added, “Nothing against the L.A. Fans, but these people [in Chicago] are terrific. We don’t draw the numbers they do in L.A., but . . . they’ve really made me feel at home and they’ve sent a thousand suggestions as to what I should do for the ankle, everything from magic lotions to diet. You name it and I’ve tried it.”
4.“Dodger Notes,” Los Angeles Times, May 4, 1978; Ross Newhan, “Garvey Stops Hitting; Dodgers Stop Losing,” Los Angeles Times, May 4, 1978.
5.Years later Lasorda would downplay his manner of speaking as a manager. “Hey, I know,” he told a reporter, “when I’m in the clubhouse or on the field, I’m bad. I know that.” Tom Hoffarth, “Q&A: Tommy Lasorda Talks Food, Baseball and Motivation, as Only Mr. Dodger Can,” L.A. Daily News, July 15, 2013, http://www.dailynews.com/general-news/20130715/qa-tommy-lasorda-talks-food-baseball-and-motivation-as-only-mr-dodger-can.
6.Newhan, “Garvey Stops Hitting.”
7.The Twins had shipped Blyleven to Texas in June 1976, and the Rangers then moved the pitcher to Pittsburgh in a four-way trade also involving the Braves and Mets in December 1977.
8.Ross Newhan, “Pirates Steal One from John, Dodgers, 6–4,” Los Angeles Times, May 8, 1978; Ross Newhan, “Garvey Strategy: Return to Home, Collect 200 Hits,” Los Angeles Times, May 9, 1978.
9.Newhan, “Garvey Strategy.”
10.Elected as prime minister of the country in 1972, Manley had at the beginning pursued a socialist agenda, primarily by nationalizing the local export industries and by attempting to more equitably distribute wealth among Jamaica’s poor. As a result of his policies American investment in the country slowed, and the local economy suffered. In 1974 Seaga rose to lead the conservative Jamaica Labour Party and oppose Manley. Both politicians, unfortunately, paid gangsters to help them hold power over local regions, which created the internecine violence that inspired the One Love Peace Concert.
11.The song’s lyrics were pointedly appropriate for the occasion.
12.This belief was due to the fact that Montreal faced massive financial losses of up to two billion dollars after hosting the 1976 Summer Games, while Munich was traumatized by terrorist attacks at the 1972 Munich Olympics. (The so-called Munich Massacre by the Palestinian-based Black September group led to the murder of eleven members of the Israeli Olympic team.) In fact, the recent realities of the Olympic Games likely were why no city other than Los Angeles had submitted a final bid for the 1984 Games.
13.Kenneth Reich, “Olympics Won’t Be Negotiated in Media—Bradley,” Los Angeles Times, April 4, 1978.
14.Kenneth Reich, “Olympics Talks End on Note of Confusion,” Los Angeles Times, April 12, 1978.
15.Kenneth Reich, “Bradley Says L.A. Can Veto Costs of Olympics,” Los Angeles Times, April 13, 1978.
16.Ross Newhan, “Kingman’s 3rd Homer Beats Dodgers in 15,” Los Angeles Times, May 15, 1978.
20. The Ballad of Glenn and Spunky
1.Plaschke with Lasorda, I Live for This, 144.
2.Plaschke with Lasorda, I Live for This, 126.
3.Plaschke with Lasorda, I Live for This, 144, 191.
4.Marshall Berges, “Ernestine & Reggie Smith,” Los Angeles Times, August 13, 1978.
5.He was drafted out of high school by the Minnesota Twins in 1963 and made his Major League debut with the Red Sox in 1966.
6.Howard Bryant, Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston (Boston: Beacon, 2003), 90.
7.Berges, “Ernestine & Reggie Smith.”
8.Jeff Angus, “Reggie Smith,” SABR Baseball Biography Project, 2014, http://sabr.org/bioproj/person/29bb796b.
9.Bob Oates, “Davey Lopes, the Quiet Man,” Los Angeles Times, May 1
0, 1978.
10.Ross Newhan, “Smith Wins It in 9th on 4th Hit,” Los Angeles Times, May 16, 1978.
11.He had just four doubles in sixty-five plate appearances for a paltry .288 slugging percentage.
12.Glenn Burke with Erik Sherman, Out at Home: The Glenn Burke Story (New York: Excel, 1995), 46; Jerry Bias and John Siple, “Letters,” Los Angeles Times, March 11, 1978; Doug Harris and Sean Madison, Out: The Glenn Burke Story (Comcast Sportsnet Production, 2010).
13.Ross Newhan, “Dodgers Add Win and Bill North,” Los Angeles Times, May 17, 1978.
14.Charges were eventually dropped in the case.
15.Ross Newhan, “A Clean Start,” Los Angeles Times, May 18, 1978.
16.Ross Newhan, “Burke Trade Stops the Music,” Los Angeles Times, May 21, 1978.
17.Harris and Madison, Out.
18.According to accounts, Glenn Burke was on deck in the game when Dusty Baker reached a key seasonal milestone—his thirtieth home run—in the sixth inning of the last game of the season on October 2, 1977. After Baker reached home Glenn greeted him with an upraised open hand, and Baker slapped it—and the high five was born. Interestingly, Baker’s home run meant the Dodgers had four such players who reached the milestone in 1977, a league record. Also, Burke followed Baker’s blast with one of his own—his first, and one of only two he would hit in his career.
19.Newhan, “Burke Trade.”
20.To confuse matters Campanis has tended to deny the story (or refuse to speak of the matter), and Burke has given several different reports regarding his response to Campanis—that he either angrily dismissed the suggestion or retorted wryly, “I guess you mean to a woman?”
21.Harris and Madison, Out.
22.Burke with Sherman, Out at Home, 29. “After the experience,” Burke said, “I cried for four hours. I was practically hyperventilating. The tears weren’t from guilt, they were from relief. I was relieved because for the first time I was sure of who I was.” Burke with Sherman, Out at Home, 36.
23.Burke with Sherman, Out at Home, 37, 39.
24.Burke with Sherman, Out at Home, 8, 9.
25.Jennifer Frey, “A Boy of Summer’s Long Chilly Winter; Once a Promising Ballplayer, Glenn Burke Is Dying of AIDS,” New York Times, October 18, 1994.
26.Harris and Madison, Out.
27.Burke with Sherman, Out at Home, 46.
28.Peter Richmond, “Tangled Up in Blue: The Brief Life and Complicated Death of Tommy Lasorda’s Gay Son,” GQ, October 1992.
29.Burke with Sherman, Out at Home, 18.
30.Richmond, “Tangled Up in Blue”; Burke with Sherman, Out at Home, 46.
31.Burke with Sherman, Out at Home, 20.
32.Burke with Sherman, Out at Home, 6, 46.
33.Burke with Sherman, Out at Home, 71.
34.Burke with Sherman, Out at Home, 18.
21. Ain’t Talkin’ ’bout Love
Epigraph: Tom Nolan, “California Dreamin’ with the Eagles,” Phonograph Record (June 1975).
1.The title of the first episode, “A Man about the House,” was a nod to the BBC sitcom Man about the House (1973–76) on which Three’s Company was based.
2.David Frum, How We Got Here: The Seventies, the Decade That Brought You Modern Life—for Better or Worse (New York: Basic, 2000), 191.
3.Edward Berkowitz, Something Happened: A Political and Social Overview of the Seventies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 198, 210–11.
4.Wolfe, “Me Decade.”
5.Born John Paul Rosenberg in Philadelphia in the 1930s, Erhard come west in the early 1960s. Eventually settling in Los Angeles in 1963, Erhard became heavily involved in the various self-help philosophies and programs of the time—including Dale Carnegie’s training course, encounter psychotherapy, L. Ron Hubbard’s Scientology, and Alexander Everett’s Mind Dynamics—all of which were quite active in Southern California and had devoted followings. Erhard eventually became an instructor of Mind Dynamics seminars and took over the Los Angeles–area instruction, but he had bigger ideas.
6.Wolfe, “Me Decade.”
7.Wolfe, “Me Decade.”
8.Barney Hoskyns, Hotel California (Hoboken NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2006), 20–22, 23. The Los Angeles music scene involved, at one time or another, such acts as the Mamas & the Papas; Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young; Joni Mitchell; Frank Zappa; the Monkees; the Doors; Buffalo Springfield; the Byrds; Donovan; Fleetwood Mac; Jackson Browne; the Eagles; the Beach Boys; and many other bands and figures—all of whom had houses up in Laurel Canyon, where they often mixed and mingled with each other and with the squadron of groupies who frequented the area.
9.Hoskyns, Hotel California, 23, 137, 138.
10.Beyond these well-known incidents at the Roxy Theater, the nightclub was host to a number of groundbreaking performances throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, many of which were recorded or broadcast on local television. Among the performances were ones by Frank Zappa & the Mothers of Invention, Bob Marley and the Wailers, Van Morrison, George Benson, Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band, and so on.
11.Eckland, in many ways, epitomized the high-end aspect of the rock-and-roll social scene of L.A. in the 1970s. Having famously dated Rod Stewart, in 1979 she hooked up with, and became engaged to (but never married), Phil Lewis, who later became the front man of one of Los Angeles’s highly sexualized, hair-centered glam rock bands of the era, L.A. Guns.
12.Paul Ciotti, “Lite Romance: Men Love to Love Women, but Why Don’t More Men Love Them Forever?,” Los Angeles Times, June 14, 1987.
13.Ciotti, “Lite Romance.”
14.Davie, California: The Vanishing Dream, 174.
15.“The Porno Plague,” Time, April 5, 1976.
16.While videotape recorders had existed since the 1950s, early devices were too expensive for home use, and the formats were so diverse that no single economy of scale existed for the production of commercially taped videos to thrive. However, it was the porn industry that almost single-handedly made the VHS tape commercially viable. “The fledgling home video industry wasn’t yet big enough for the major studios to release their titles on tape; pornography led the way. According to Video magazine, a pioneer publication in this new market, almost 70% of pre-recorded tapes sold in 1977–78 were X-rated.” David Jennings, Skinflicks: The Inside Story of the X-Rated Video Industry (Bloomington IN: First Books Library, 2000), 53.
17.Holmes, who had been born in Ohio but moved to Los Angeles in the later 1960s after a stint in the U.S. Army, grew to become something of a household name. “He was simply the King,” said adult filmmaker Bob Chinn. Coco Kiyonaga and Michael Copner, “The Boogie Days and Nights of Bob Chinn,” Cult Movies, no. 24 (1997).
18.“Valley Retrospective: The 1970s,” Los Angeles Daily News, January 20, 2011, http://www.dailynews.com/20110131/valley-retrospective-the-1970s.
19.Bobby Bouton and Nancy Marshall, Home Games: Two Baseball Wives Speak Out (New York: St. Martin’s, 1983), 138. This book was about the trials of baseball wives.
20.Fimrite, “God a Football Fan.”
21.Baker and Harriet divorced in 1987, right at the end of Baker’s playing career, and he remarried in 1994.
22.He and Gloria later divorced.
23.“Playboy Interview: Steve Garvey; A Candid Conversation with the Squeaky-Clean, All-American Baseball Star,” Playboy, June 1981.
22. Untaxing the Golden Cow
1.It was widely reported at the time that the last “profitable” Olympic Games were those held in Los Angeles in 1932.
2.While team President Peter O’Malley said in early 1978 he was confident that the Dodgers could work out a schedule with Olympics planners, in the end the idea fell through, and an open-air Olympic Swim Stadium was built, with the financial backing of the McDonald’s Corporation, on the campus of the University of Southern California.
3.Payne and Ratzan, Tom Bradley, 216.
4.Payne and Ratzan, Tom Bradley, 216.
5.Frances Savitch, who at the time was an aid to Mayor Bradley.
6.Zev Yaroslavsky, “L.A. Needs Saving from Its Inferiority Complex,” Los Angeles Times, April 9, 1978. Yaroslavsky expressed even deeper fears—that the city would overextend itself, that the Olympic Games would be a great disappointment because they won’t do “for us what we think they can,” that the city’s lack of resolve in its response to the IOC regarding controlling costs would put it in an untenable position, and that the IOC’s eventual demands would lead Los Angeles into a “financial quagmire.” “What city in its right mind would want to salvage our bid?” he asked. “The fact remains that if the IOC refuses to play by our rules, the 1984 Olympics could become a refuge that no country would be willing to grant an entry visa.”
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