Dodgerland

by Michael Fallon

  A few days later, of course, Lasorda had reverted to his usual overconfident self. “The only questions mark I can see are that we don’t know how many games we’ll win it by and who we’ll play in the fall classic.” Then, much as he had on the first day of camp a year before, Lasorda made a major announcement. Having obtained the endorsement of the team president, Peter O’Malley, and several of the team’s veteran players, Lasorda had decided to appoint Dodgers second baseman Dave Lopes as the team’s captain. Lopes would be the fifth player to hold the position on the Dodgers since the team’s first captain, Pee Wee Reese, held the position from 1949 to 1958. He would also be the team’s first captain since Willie Davis held the position in 1973. Lasorda, in choosing Lopes, was well aware of the particular spirit of his team, filled as it was with a number of strong and independent spirits. “We have a number of guys of equal qualification,” Lasorda said afterward. “But you can only have one leader, one captain, and I’ve always felt Davey is a natural. I look for him to play a prominent role in the same way a coach does. I look for him to serve as a liaison between the players and myself.”25

  Lopes, for his part, was in tune with his manager in recognizing the need to focus on player relations in the Dodger clubhouse. “There are always situations where a player is reluctant to go to the manager,” said Lopes. “There are liable to be incidences of animosity and turmoil. By understanding my teammates’ personalities and maintaining rapport with the manager and coaches, I can possibly head off these situations.” Tellingly, after the appointment was announced and players responded with applause, several players told pointed jokes. “Captain?” said Tommy John, looking over at a teammate whom he later admitted he had never found likable. “Everyone knows that Ron Cey is our leader.” (“Maybe,” Lopes reportedly responded with a laugh, “but Ron isn’t stopping at captain. He’s going right on to commissioner.”) After the joking subsided players seemed to agree that the move would likely serve to alleviate much of the behind-the-scenes stresses on the clubhouse. “It’s difficult to put into words,” said Ron Cey, “but there is no doubt in my mind that this was a good step, that Davey will be more than an honorary captain. He tried to do a lot of things last year but was restricted by not having the official title. This will give him the weight he needs, will give an impact to his suggestions.”26

  Of course, Lasorda couldn’t help but take some credit for Lopes’s ascendance to the position, as well as his infield partner Bill Russell’s blossoming. “Davey Lopes and Bill Russell were exactly alike,” said Lasorda of his middle infielders’ early days. “Davey wouldn’t say two words all night. And you didn’t know Russell was around until the game started. I took them everywhere. I was always trying to draw them out. They now represent the two most dramatic personality changes I’ve ever contributed to.” And while this could have been another instance of Lasorda’s bluster, in fact Lopes was the first to agree with his manager. “Lasorda pushed me toward being even more aggressive, more extroverted,” said Lopes. “He instilled a lot of his own personality in me, both in my approach to baseball and in my personal life.” Lasorda’s transformation of Lopes was so complete by spring training in 1978 that some around the baseball world had actually dubbed the formerly timid and retiring second baseman something approaching the opposite—a showboat, or a “popoff.” To that Lopes took umbrage. “I wouldn’t call myself a popoff at all,” he said. “I don’t say things just to satisfy my ego or spirit. . . . Yet if you ask me a question, I’ll give you the honest answer.”27

  His agreement with Lopes struck, Lasorda kept a close watch in the early days of spring training and made no bones about his increased expectations for his players. Lopes, he said, would be completely recovered from several injuries that slowed him down in 1977, and so he expected more steals from his speedy second baseman. Cey, who, after a record-setting month of April in 1977, was stricken by a groin problem and fell into a slump, would be more relaxed and consistent. Dusty Baker would continue his recovery from leg injuries. Lasorda even had hope for his light-hitting catcher. Steve Yeager came to spring training having replaced his regular aviator-style eyeglasses—after he had broken six different pairs of them in 1977—with new soft contact lenses, which he swore gave him much sharper vision. “I can now see Chub Feeney’s autograph on the ball when it’s being pitched,” said Yeager, laughing. “Before, I had trouble reading road signs at night. . . . Seeing this well is a brand new feeling. I’m excited. I’ve got to believe that if you can see a lot better, you should be able to perform a lot better.”28 Lasorda would expect more from his rugged backstop’s bat.

  And so on down the lineup. Terry Forster would bolster the bullpen. Rick Monday would make a comeback similar to Dusty Baker’s in 1977. Stalwarts like Don Sutton, Steve Garvey, Reggie Smith, and Tommy John would continue to star. Even the bench would contribute, with a range of quality talent in Lee Lacy, Teddy Martinez (if he could recover completely from his injury), Willie Crawford (if he could return to form), and tough backup catchers Jerry Grote and Johnny Oates. And then, of course, there were the ageless pinch-hit specialists, Vic Davalillo and Manny Mota.

  “Look at that,” Lasorda bellowed across the Dodger practice field during morning calisthenics. “Look at Mota and Davalillo. They must have a hundred years between them.” The actual number of years that the two ballplayers shared in 1978, if official records can be believed, is eighty-one. “People say I’m a connoisseur of antiques, that it’s the only reason I’m keeping Mota and Davalillo around.” All joking aside, the presence of both players—each in their forties and each from modest baseball-centric families who grew up in Latin countries (Mota from the Dominican Republic, Davalillo from Venezuela)—was a remarkable thing, and all parties seemed aware of the fact. “I am very happy,” Davalillo said, when asked how he felt to be there. Very early in the spring Davalillo compared life in the Mexican League with life in the Major Leagues. “In Mexico,” he said, “you get 100 pesos meal money. That’s four American dollars a day. In the big leagues, you have to tip that much a day.” “I feel very good about being back in the majors,” he told a reporter a bit later that spring. “I didn’t think it would happen, . . . not at my age.”29

  Manny Mota, the man whom Walt Alston once said would “roll out of bed in December and go 4-for-4,” echoed his teammate’s sentiments. As a child Mota said, “we used oranges and lemons for baseballs, and we made mitts by sticking our hand into a paper bag. . . . I dreamed about having spikes and gloves and a real baseball to play with. I still think a lot about those memories. They are good ones for me.”30 Now, many years later, after sixteen seasons in the big leagues, Mota was facing a major milestone. Long considered to be one of the game’s great pinch-hitting experts, Mota would start 1978 just twenty-two pinch hits behind the all-time leading pinch hitter, his former Pirates teammate Smokey Burgess. Of the record Mota was unequivocal. “I want to stay until I catch Smokey,” he said. “I would like to catch him this year but I will be proud to catch him anytime.” Within hearing range of his teammates and manager, however, Mota was more humble. “It is nice to be back. It is nice to be back with determination. I know that as I get older I have to work harder.”31

  That both Davalillo and Mota would make the cut out of spring training gave hope to aging fans of the team. Not every one of the Dodgers’ projected role players had the favor of their manager. Lasorda had in fact lost patience with two young Dodgers—namely, Glenn Burke and Ed Goodson—who had stalled in their development. “Glenn can run, field and throw,” said Tom Lasorda very early in spring training. “He hasn’t proved to us he can hit.” Lasorda had a point. Though Burke had outstanding speed, was an excellent fielder, and had performed extremely well at every level of the Minors, in two years of part-time play in the Majors he had yet to generate anything at the plate. (His slugging percentage in 226 plate appearances in 1976 and 1977 was a woeful .312.) “I’m convinced Monday is sound,” Lasorda continued, “which means I’m left to ba
lance the bench. I’ve got right-handers like Manny Mota and Lee Lacy who have showed me they can hit better than Burke and I have people like Crawford and Davalillo who I have to keep because there will definitely be times when I’ll need the left handers.” Translation: he had little need for weak right-handed hitters like Burke and Goodson. Perhaps anticipating fan reaction regarding Lasorda’s statements, Dodger general manager Al Campanis had his own things to say on Burke and Goodson. “In Burke’s case,” said Campanis, “he is out of options. He can’t be sent to the minors without his permission. He must be traded and I expect there will be interest in him. . . . In Goodson’s case, . . . he can be released, traded or consider playing in Japan.”32

  The ongoing decision about whether to shelve these two players would, at least in one case, prove to have some lasting ramifications. Interestingly, Campanis himself had perhaps sealed the fate of at least one of these players when he had announced, several weeks earlier, that because of payroll concerns, the Dodgers were going to hold the traveling roster this year to twenty-four regular players, as opposed to the usual twenty-five. Goodson, after a lackluster spring, was released outright by the Dodgers on March 17; he would never, after eight seasons in the big leagues, appear in another Major League game. As for Burke, the jury was still out, but just barely. Burke survived spring cuts when Willie Crawford, who struggled through a far worse spring that Burke’s, was cut outright by the team at the very end of the spring exhibition season on March 30. Teddy Martinez, meanwhile, would survive spring cuts and start the season as the Dodgers’ utility man. On the pitching staff, amid even more brutal competition, Lance Rautzhan, who had been on the Dodgers’ roster in the 1977 World Series and pitched well in spring training, would be sent back to Albuquerque in favor of another reliever, the locally born screwball-tossing Mexican American right-hander Bobby Castillo. Hank Webb, who had made an appearance with the team as a September call-up in 1977, but was now pushing twenty-eight, could not turn his presence on the forty-man roster into a spot on the Major League team. He would return to Albuquerque in April and never appear in another Major League game.

  17

  Paradise Defiled

  There was never a region so unlikely to become a vast metropolitan area as Southern California. It is . . . a gigantic improvisation.

  —Carey McWilliams, Southern California: An Island on the Land

  At the dawn of 1978 Los Angeles was an uncertain city. L.A.’s former self-confidence and swagger had been gradually shaken by the events and conditions of the 1970s, and now, in the new year, many Southern Californians seemed to be suddenly waking from a long daydream. “Of course,” Time had written in a July 1977 reappraisal of its 1969 article mostly lauding the Golden State, “the California dream was doomed from its inception; a society based on the illogic of instability is no society at all.” Back in 1972, in his book California: The Vanishing Dream, author Michael Davie noted that despite the wealth, sunshine, talent, and knowledge in California, “worldly happiness” was, for some reason, fleeting. “The economic and technological machine was grinding on,” Davie wrote, “but fewer and fewer people thought that its whirrings were a prelude to a better future.”1 In 1971, two years before the roiling economic crises of 1973 that would hit California hard, a poll had already revealed that half the state’s recent arrivals, and a full third of its permanent residents, would leave the state, given the chance. The next year migration to California crashed—to around thirty thousand, or one-tenth the annual rate of three hundred thousand who arrived during the 1960s.

  It wasn’t that the state was significantly more troubled than anywhere else in the country in the 1970s. Rather, as Time pointed out, it was that the utopian image of Los Angeles from its heyday in the 1950s and 1960s so harshly clashed with daily life in the 1970s, which was defined by traffic congestion and air pollution, job losses and economic instability, racial conflicts and other results of the postwar patterns of development and consumerism. Living in 1970s Los Angeles was a tedious proposition, and the fantasy of the California paradise was seeming more and more just that—a fantasy. Now, after promoting itself as the golden land of opportunity for a half century, the resulting unfettered growth had led to very real systemic and infrastructural problems. For the typical Angeleno in 1978 days were thick and hot as soup, and life was organized around freeway commutes and long delays, sore lungs and red eyes, slow trips to auto body shops and busy shopping centers, the hassle of long workweeks and the struggle to earn a hard dollar. Living in Los Angeles meant you had to be ready for ceaseless work, because not doing so meant you would fall behind the vast roving mechanical herd of the other freeway-bound residents of the region. In short, real life in California was anything but a pleasant stroll along the seashore. As a result, the magazine explained, the problems there seemed somehow more jarring than in the rest of the country: “The loss seems greater in California because there the expectations were so much greater than elsewhere. . . . California has clearly lost the magic it once had.”2

  The death of the California Dream was something few people truly wanted to acknowledge. However, as the troubled decade of the 1970s wore on, more and more Californians could no longer ignore the hard truths about their lives and the falseness of the dream. If a singular moment epitomized this dawning realization, it was one that occurred during the hippie-bohemian summer of 1969. In the Los Angeles hills located just north of the fantasy factory of Hollywood, in a house on Cielo Drive, lived the diminutive Polish-native filmmaker Roman Polanski with his wife, Sharon Tate. Polanski was, most famously at the time, the director of the unusual horror film Rosemary’s Baby, which includes a scene in which a young woman (played by Mia Farrow) is raped and impregnated by Satan. Polanski’s life up until 1969 had seen its share of deep trauma and tragedy. Born a Polish Jew before World War II, as an eight-year-old boy he somehow survived the final purging of the Kraków Ghetto, when his father, who had been lined up to board a train to the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp in Austria, pushed him away and denied knowing him. Somehow Polanski survived the war, mostly by hiding in barns or forests and eating whatever he could steal or find. After the war he was reunited with his father, who had somehow survived.3 In time Polanski attended the famed Polish film school in Lódz, and eventually he made a number of highly regarded films—including Knife in the Water, which was nominated for a Best Foreign Film Oscar in 1962. Rosemary’s Baby was his first big Hollywood break, and it was a smash success. Afterward, Polanski was one of the leading lights in Hollywood.

  What thrust Polanski into the middle of California’s looming identity crisis was a traumatic event that occurred on August 9, 1969. Polanski had married the beautiful young actress Sharon Tate, star of his 1967 horror spoof, The Fearless Vampire Killers, in 1968. In February 1969 the Polanskis, flush from the success of his first Hollywood film, rented a house at 10500 Cielo Drive in the Benedict Canyon neighborhood that was owned by Rudi Altobelli, a manager of stars such as Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn. Previous to the Polanskis, the house had been, as fate would have it, rented by music producer Terry Melcher and his girlfriend Candice Bergen. By 1969, however, Melcher and Bergen had split up, and Melcher had moved to a house in Malibu. But it was while he still lived on Cielo Drive that Melcher had set in motion the wheels that would lead to tragedy.

  In retrospect, it is easy to discern how the California sense of openness and do whatever feels right played a role in what happened next. Though the arriviste Polanskis had no way of knowing, the canyons north of the downtown—Laurel, Benedict, Topanga—had been ground zero for much of the region’s hedonistic impulses that reached their peak in the late 1960s. The region became known for wild parties, drug use, open and rampant sex, and the presence of clinging fringe elements—ranging from the nubile young “groupies” at the houses of rock stars to the looming presence of some dark and mysterious local cults. Terry Melcher, a noted profligate with a nasty drug habit, was said, tellingly enough, to have gro
wn tired of the chaos and impositions of the canyon life before he finally left for the relative calm of Malibu.

  A story that emerged later may help explain Melcher’s frustration. Sometime in 1968 he had attended a party at the Pacific Palisades house of Beach Boy Dennis Wilson. There, Wilson introduced Melcher to a young singer named Charles Manson. At the time Manson and a group of mostly female followers, who called themselves the “Manson Family,” had befriended Wilson and his songwriting partner, Gregg Jakobson. Wilson and Jakobson talked Melcher into coming to hear Manson play. Nothing came of it—Melcher wasn’t interested enough to book a recording session—and afterward Manson felt betrayed. He told Manson Family members that Melcher had broken his promises and that he was intent on keeping Manson’s music from the world. On August 8, therefore, the increasingly agitated Manson directed family member Charles “Tex” Watson to go to the house where Melcher used to live. “I want you,” Manson said, “to totally destroy everyone in that house, as gruesome as you can.” 4 According to another family member’s later confession, Manson picked the house simply to send a message to Melcher.

  Much has been written and said about the Manson Family’s spree of murders, so there’s no need to give another recounting here. On the evening of August 8, 1969, the world changed not only for Roman Polanski and his family and friends, but for all of Los Angeles. At the Polanski residence that night were his wife, Sharon Tate, who was more than eight months pregnant; a friend of Tate’s named Jay Sebring; a Polish screenwriter and friend of Polanski’s named Wojciech Frykowski; and Frykowski’s girlfriend, Abigail Folger, heir to the coffee fortune and an employee in the Welfare Department of the city. Polanski, who was away in London at the time working on a screenplay with his partner, Andrew Braunsberg, for a film called Day of the Dolphin, had asked his friends Frykowski and Folger to take care of his pregnant wife until he could return on August 12. Early the next morning in London, on August 9, Polanski received the news in a call from his manager. According to Braunsberg, Polanski was profoundly devastated. Not only had he lost his beloved wife and their unborn son, but he had lost the promise of family stability and contentment—something he had not experienced since the years before World War II. At the press conference a few days later, Polanski, visibly stricken and distraught, berated the press for spreading wild and unfounded rumors about the couple and what had exactly happened at the house.