Between the Bylines

by Doug Krikorian

  “Oh, no, you’re the first one,” she answered quickly. “And I’ve had a wonderful time today.”

  “So have I,” I said, and I put my right arm around her shoulders in a sign of affection.

  She looked at me shyly, and suddenly I felt an urge to go a step further to display the growing fondness I was feeling for this demure lady whom I already realized was cut from a different raiment.

  Should I, I thought to myself? Should I risk alienating her? Should I set myself up for a humbling rejection? Or should I go ahead and attempt to kiss her?

  Emboldened by alcohol, I chose the latter. I bent over and put my lips firmly against hers in what would be the first of several ardent kisses we’d exchange at that restaurant on that glad evening.

  We stayed until the place closed and straggled back to her flat as I resumed grilling her lightly.

  Among other things, I found out that she was devoted to fitness, a dedicated jogger and swimmer.

  I wasn’t surprised, since the frame that had been concealed by her overcoat at the Crystal Palace railway station was trim and firm.

  “I run as much as I can,” she said. “In college, I was into judo. I actually wound up earning a black belt.”

  She then related a story that I found humorous at the time without realizing the deep insight it revealed about her character.

  “A couple of years ago we were at a party here in London, and there were some British Royal Marines present,” she said. “Well, one was pretty drunk, and he pinched my bun as I walked past him. I reacted instinctively and body-slammed him. Other partygoers immediately came over and warned me that there might be serious trouble and that the embarrassed Royal Marine and his friends might seek revenge against me and the friends I was with. We were advised to leave, and so we reluctantly did.”

  I couldn’t imagine a lady who didn’t weigh more than 115 pounds—Gillian was five-foot-five—roughing up a Royal Marine, but I would discover in time that Gillian’s gentleness and sweetness obscured a resilient toughness that she displayed so admiringly throughout her most formidable ordeal.

  “I also like working out,” I offered. “Lifted weights most my life. In my younger days, weightlifting dominated my life. Boxed a little. Grown to love jogging in recent years.”

  I suddenly realized a most embarrassing oversight on my part.

  “You know, I don’t even know your surname,” I said.

  “Howgego,” she said. “What’s yours?”

  “Krikorian. Howgego? What ethnic origin is that? That doesn’t sound British.”

  “The origin supposedly is Huguenot. I know about 200,000 Huguenots had been driven out of France in religious persecutions by the end of the seventeenth century. I guess my distant family was one of them.”

  “Well, Gillian Howgego, do you mind if I stay at your place tonight? I have no idea how to get back to central London. I’ll sleep on the couch.”

  I was taken slightly aback by her response.

  “That won’t be necessary,” she said softly.

  Chapter 3

  It didn’t take me long to realize that Gillian was devoted to her profession, and that made a favorable impression on me. She rose early the next day for a treatment session with an elderly gentleman who had suffered a stroke, driving over to his residence that I recall as being in Whitechapel, the east London district where Jack the Ripper committed his notorious murders.

  She would meet with four other patients that day and not return to her flat until eight o’clock in the evening. I later would discover from her co-workers how much she was revered by those she treated and that she often would provide assistance to those in need of it even on her off days.

  I took the train back to central London later that morning, got off at Victoria Station, checked out of the Park Lane Hilton and returned to Gillian’s flat by noon. I was going back to Los Angeles the next day and decided to take an afternoon stroll around Streatham Hill.

  There was a foggy mist—I still hadn’t seen sunshine since arriving in London—hanging over what turned out to be an eclectic area in which there were myriad small shops, a large bowling alley, an indoor public swimming plunge, a couple historic movie theaters and many cafés and pubs.

  But my favorite place turned out to be a pint-sized establishment I found around the corner from Gillian’s residence operated by two spinster sisters who related to me their experiences during the London Blitz when they hid in an underground railway station bunker as the German bombs fell. Despite its small dimensions, the place was stocked with a lot of merchandise and reading materials, including all the London newspapers, of which I purchased six.

  Gillian was exhausted when she finally arrived home that evening, and I would later find out she routinely put in twelve-hour days. We went out for an Indian dinner—it turned out to be her favorite cuisine—and I soon discovered that Gillian was a strong advocate of women’s rights, that she served as a union rep, that she hadn’t been fond of Margaret Thatcher and that she wasn’t a monarchist.

  I listened attentively and didn’t react to anything she was saying even though I was more conventional on political matters. After all, it was too early in our brief time together to engage in a debate over subjects that weren’t exactly high on my priority list.

  She also informed me she had recently had a relationship come to an end—much like myself—and I found a refreshing innocence in her sincere, transparent manner in which there wasn’t a hint of opaqueness.

  At this early juncture, I made a concerted effort not to volunteer information about myself unless asked, and I continually, slyly maneuvered the discourse toward Gillian. I noticed long ago that guys in such circumstances who babble on about themselves in the first person often send yawning women scurrying to the exits.

  Finally, after a while, Gillian said, “Douglas, I’m tired of talking about myself. What about you? I don’t know anything about you.”

  Despite my reluctance, I knew I had to reveal a few tidbits.

  “Well, ask me a question,” I responded.

  “What led you to becoming a newspaperman?” she asked.

  “Yes, well, it all goes back to the first Major League Baseball game I ever attended between the San Francisco Giants and Los Angeles Dodgers at Seals Stadium in San Francisco when I was fourteen years old,” I responded, purposely leaving out the year—it was 1958—so she couldn’t figure out my age. “I was with my father, and we arrived at the stadium early and watched the players go through their hitting and fielding drills. And I saw a group of men on the field in suits and sports coats holding pens and notepads and asked my dad who they were. And he said, ‘They’re sportswriters. They cover the teams for their newspapers.’ And I said, ‘You mean they get to travel with the teams?’ And my dad said, ‘Yes.’ And from that moment on, I wanted to become a sportswriter because I knew even at that age that I’d never realize my passionate desire to become a Major League Baseball player. So I figured the next best thing was to become a sportswriter and get the opportunity to travel with a major-league team.

  “And that’s precisely what happened a few months after I joined the Los Angeles Herald Examiner [of course, I didn’t mention the date]. I was given the opportunity to take a road trip with the Los Angeles Dodgers, and it was a surreal experience as I visited places like New York, Pittsburgh and Houston for the first time. And then that fall, my boss at the Herald Examiner, a legendary, larger-than-life character named Bud Furillo, assigned me to cover the Los Angeles Lakers. And they had three of the most famous basketball players in the world on the team in Wilt Chamberlain, Elgin Baylor and Jerry West. And the next two seasons, I had to be one of the happiest persons in America, as I was traveling first class around the country with the Lakers and visiting all the big cities and staying in top hotels and being friends with most of the Lakers players. I even served as Wilt Chamberlain’s chauffeur one afternoon in Atlanta as we drove around checking out women, a fact Bud Furillo later would report in
his column in the Herald Examiner.

  Doug patrols center field at Dodger Stadium in 1974 during a celebrity baseball game.

  “Now I’m sure you don’t even know who Wilt Chamberlain was, but he was a seven-foot-one superstar center who once scored one hundred points in a game and once averaged more than fifty points a game for an entire season. He and I didn’t get off to a good start with the Lakers. Early in that first season I covered the team, Wilt had played poorly in a game, and my lead paragraph in the Herald Examiner the next day was, ‘Wilt Chamberlain was the tallest spectator at The Forum last night…’ And a couple of nights later at The Forum, a few hours before the game, he saw me in the team’s offices, came up to me and said angrily, ‘Hey, my man, who in the fuck do you think you are saying I was the tallest spectator at The Forum the other night?’ And I said, ‘Well, Wilt, you were.’ And he gave me a look of utter contempt and said, ‘I should kick your ass for that.’ And I said, pointing to my chin, ‘Go ahead and take your best shot. I need the money.’ I was scared to death, but I was young and dumb and had a lot of nerve in those days. Well, Wilt suddenly broke out in a laugh, extended his right hand and we became friends until years later when he got mad at me again at another story I had written about him. He hasn’t spoken to me for the past five years.”

  Wilt Chamberlain waves off the potential cameraman’s evidence on the track at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum as he and Doug prepare for mock fisticuffs.

  Gillian smiled softly and said, “That must have been some experience.”

  “It was a dream come true, and I kept pinching myself to make sure it wasn’t all a dream during my early days at the Herald Examiner,” I said. “I was being paid to do a job I gladly would have done for nothing. Here I was, a young guy who came from a small, sleepy farming community of fewer than two thousand called Fowler—it was located in the middle of California near a place called Fresno in the San Joaquin Valley—and meeting all these famous people. Never forget that first holiday season at the Herald Examiner receiving a Christmas card from the actor Cliff Robertson and his wife, Dina Merrill. I must have proudly shown that card to everyone I knew. I was too naïve at the time to realize that their PR agency had sent out Christmas cards to all the members of the Los Angeles media.”

  There was so much more to tell Gillian, but it all could wait. I didn’t want her yawning and scurrying to the exit.

  I paused a moment and then said, “That’s enough talk about me. I think you’re much more interesting.”

  “No, Douglas, I think you are,” she said.

  She drove me to Heathrow early the next morning, and I remember during the flight back to Los Angeles how different I felt than I had the previous week when I arrived in London upset about the failed radio opportunity and not exactly cheered by the breakup with my girlfriend.

  Now I felt that joyful giddiness endemic to a new romance in which the principals haven’t been together long enough to have those long bored silences, or to know each other’s faults or to have built up resentments.

  Chapter 4

  It seemed as though my chance meeting of Gillian Howgego altered my fortunes. Within a month after my return to LA, KMPC management sought my services again after Todd Christensen’s pairing with Joe McDonnell had turned sour.

  Joe and I, finally, were on the air together by June, and it turned out we had a natural chemistry that resulted in our show becoming an immediate hit on the Southern California airways.

  We argued heatedly; never couched our views in euphemistic, PC claptrap; and had first-rate guests from our long list of contacts and an aggressive producer named Nick Zaccagnio. We became known as the McDonnell-Douglas Show—a former sportswriter turned fight publicist, John Beyrooty, gave us the nickname in honor of the Long Beach aerospace giant—and we soon took over the prestigious drive-time shift from Jim Lampley, who moved to mornings to replace the departing Robert W. Morgan, a Los Angeles disc jockey institution.

  We became so popular—and controversial—that Lampley felt compelled one morning to stage a three-hour referendum on our show. He polled his listeners, and happily, more folk liked us than detested us, though there were plenty of dissenters.

  I was now holding down two full-time jobs, and what made such duty especially hard was the daily seventy-mile round-trip commute from Long Beach to Hollywood, where the KMPC station was located on Sunset Boulevard on the one-time Warner Brothers lot where the first talking movie, The Jazz Singer, with Al Jolson, was shot in 1927. I found myself spending two to three hours a day on the congested freeways.

  But I didn’t mind such a grind because my monthly income had more than doubled, and the increased recognition—suddenly, people were asking me (me!) for an autograph—certainly wasn’t harmful to my vanity. Joe McDonnell and I were continually being mentioned in the local newspapers—it seemed like the Los Angeles Times’s radio-TV columnist Larry Stewart, an old friend from college, had a weekly obsession with us—and in July I even was offered a position on an upcoming new football show that would be shown on the local CBS television affiliate. “Krikorian Is the King of All Media,” wrote another radio-TV columnist, Tom Hoffarth, in the Los Angeles Daily News, affixing shock jock Howard Stern’s self-proclaimed moniker on me.

  Hoffarth was dripping in sarcasm—he routinely demeaned my radio work—but such a description wasn’t that far off the mark. The following year, I even got a speaking role in the Ron Shelton film Cobb, based on Hall of Fame baseball player Ty Cobb, which starred Tommy Lee Jones and Robert Wuhl and, ironically, wound up costing me my job at KMPC.

  Oh, was I busy then. I was not only doing four columns a week for the Press-Telegram and doing five radio shows a week for KMPC but also that fall could be seen on Sunday mornings on Channel 2 with local sportscaster Jim Hill on the L.A. Football Company, providing pertinent information and analysis on the two National Football League teams that were then in Los Angeles, the Rams and Raiders.

  I had been calling Gillian on a regular basis since our spring meeting and invited her to come and see me even though my time was limited by my hectic schedule. I had had previous dalliances in Europe and even had flown a couple ladies over to visit me, which I regretted both times. Despite the fact I had known Gillian for only a few days, I had a different feeling about her than I did about the others and just knew I’d have no regrets if she came, which she did at the end of the summer.

  On a Friday in late September, Gillian arrived at LAX, where I picked her up late in the morning and took her for lunch at Musso & Frank’s, Hollywood’s oldest restaurant where F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway once ate lightly and drank seriously, according to lore. We then went to the radio station, where she patiently sat in the studio and listened to Joe McDonnell and me do our four hours of wicked repartee, acerbic putdowns, goofy anecdotes and insightful, albeit at times hilarious, interviews.

  I’m sure she was worn out by the long flight and inhumanly bored by our show, but she would say later, “I have no idea what you guys were talking about and who you guys were talking to, but it all seemed so interesting.” I thought she was only being diplomatic but found out later it wasn’t in Gillian’s nature to tell fabrications, even small ones.

  Rams running back Eric Dickerson (second from the right) became the second player to rush for more than 2,000 yards in a single season, with 2,105 in 1984. He poses here with (from left) Donald Sterling and Doug and (on the far right) former Pepperdine University chancellor M. Norvel Young.

  I remember her being astounded by the maze of freeways—there are none in London—that crisscrossed the area and her saying, “We have railways and you have freeways.”

  “There are eight freeways within the LA boundaries covering more than 650 miles,” I said, and the only reason I knew such numbers is that I had recently read a magazine story on the subject.

  After the show, we flew to Las Vegas, where we checked into Caesars Palace, site of a scheduled middleweight title match the following night
between champion Terry Norris and Simon Brown. We freshened up in our room and then headed across the street to the Barbary Coast, a small hotel at the corner of Las Vegas Boulevard and Flamingo that at the time had the most acclaimed restaurant in Las Vegas, Michael’s (it now is located at the South Point Hotel and hasn’t lost its stellar gourmet luster).

  Dining at Michael’s had become a pre-fight ritual for me for more than a decade. It started as a result of the friendship my closest newspaper pal, Allan Malamud, had with Kenny Epstein, who then ran the Barbary Coast for its owner, Jackie Gaughan, a Las Vegas casino pioneer. Epstein always would comp the Michael’s dinner because of Malamud, who worked with me at the Herald Examiner before joining the Los Angeles Times after the Herald Examiner folded and long had been a close friend of Epstein.

  Allan was a colorful fellow who appeared in bit roles in many movies—director Ron Shelton of Bull Durham and White Men Can’t Jump fame was one of his closest friends—and wrote a popular column of miscellaneous sporting items. He was a ravenous consumer of steaks and pies and cakes and also was a high-stakes blackjack player who would die of a heart attack at the too-young age of fifty-four on September 15, 1996, ironically preceding Gillian’s death by exactly five years.

  Anyway, as Gillian and I were walking out the front entrance of Caesars that evening on the way to Michael’s, the rambunctious fight promoter Don King was coming in flanked by his usual entourage of diamond-bejeweled hangers-on.

  I knew King well since I had covered so many of his shows, including most of the title matches of Larry Holmes and Mike Tyson when they were heavyweight champions and the classic Sugar Ray Leonard–Robert Duran fight in Montreal and the infamous “No Mas” rematch in New Orleans.

  “Krikorian! Oh, what a delight! What a magnificent, gorgeous, breathtaking young lady you have with you! Indubitably!” he roared, as Gillian shyly looked up at this huge African American gentleman with his trademark hair that resembled a silver-hued bushel of cotton candy.