H2 O’Malley, With Regret

Last month, in the New Yorker, the writer Michael Korda took up the cause of the late Charles Bludhorn, a corporate chieftain heretofore regarded as one of the original barbarians at the gate.

Bludhorn, for those with short memories, ruled the Gulf & Western Co. during the time it acquired Paramount Studios, Simon & Schuster publishing company, and a host of others. Gulf & Western, in fact, was wholly a creation of Bludhorn and his talent for sweet deals.

By all accounts he was a tyrant and blunderbuss, the kind of man who would assemble his top staff so they could watch him tear an unfavorable newspaper article into bits and then fling the pieces at them. A man who would banish one of his factotums if the said factotum failed to arrange a date with a beautiful woman Bludhorn had spotted in a hotel lobby.

Korda tells his stories from memory because, at the time, he was head of Simon and Schuster and, thus, one of the lieutenants unceasingly harangued by his boss. Yet Korda’s remembrance is filled with affection and hilarity. At the end, he confesses that he misses Bludhorn and all he represented:

“In an age of increasing corporate blandness, when CEOs seemed determined to behave as if all business were a public service, Bludhorn was the last of the great business eccentrics: A one-man band, who made capitalism seem not only profitable but fun.”

This week, in Los Angeles, we were delivered the news that the O’Malleys would sell the Dodgers, and a similar regret settled over our city. It was not, I think, a regret founded in the fear that the Dodgers-as-we-know-them will soon disappear. They won’t, and conceivably could even grow into a better team.

Actually, Peter O’Malley was close to naming the regret when he described one of his reasons for selling the team: “I think family ownership of sports today is probably a dying breed. You need a broader base than an individual family to carry you through the storms. Groups or corporations are probably the way of the future.”

Of course, in a technical sense, O’Malley was dead wrong. We have more of the super-rich than ever before, computer kings and faucet kings who could buy the Dodgers and have plenty left over for a run at the zinc market. Robert Daly of Warner Bros. already has been discussed as a possible buyer. And what of Michael Ovitz, often described as desirous of a big league team and now nesting on his $90 million from Disney?

There’s dozens of others who could buy the Dodgers. But that’s not what O’Malley meant. When he said “family ownership” he meant families whose sole occupation was the team. Families who built teams, and whose future and fortune depended on their success.

The names of those families have largely disappeared--and not just from sports. In Los Angeles we once had airlines run by the men who founded them. And department stores and banks. We also had a newspaper run by a family--named Chandler.

As with Bludhorn, these figures were often as craven and ruthless as they were colorful. One of the Chandlers once rode around town with a small cannon mounted to the hood of his car as a warning to union organizers. And lest we forget, it was Walter O’Malley who rousted an entire community from its roots so he could build Dodger Stadium in Chavez Ravine.

At the time many of these characters were viewed as manipulators and double-crossers. And, they ended up with fortunes and the rest of us did not. So why do we feel this sharp regret at the fading away of one of their kind?

It’s odd. But I think it has to do with their paradoxical humanity. We could see the naked passions that drove them. O’Malley desperately needed the Dodgers to succeed. If his gamble in Los Angeles had failed, O’Malley would have ended up tending bar at an Irish pub.

In other words, he was not a faucet king and did not have a faucet fortune to back him up. He would get rich or go broke on one roll of the dice: the Dodgers.

As Winston Churchill said in another context, when you play for more than you can afford to lose, you learn the game. O’Malley learned. The rest of us watched, sensing the odds, and found ourselves rooting for him as if we had been dragooned onto his team.

For example, when O’Malley first built Dodger Stadium he artfully forgot to install water fountains. This oversight was pointed out to O’Malley in the Dodgers’ first season at Chavez and he expressed befuddlement at the mistake.

Of course, it was no mistake. Without water, the Dodger fans were forced to drink Coca-Cola or beer. Jim Murray, then a new sports columnist at The Times, wrote about this carny trick not with outrage but humor, pointing out that movie-house managers referred to the maneuver as installing “Coca-Cola plumbing.”

Murray renamed the Dodger owner, “H2 and the column became one of Murray’s most famous. It is now reprinted in a text for college students titled, “California Heritage, An Anthology of History and Literature.”

So you see, O’Malley was creating culture and literary legend almost as soon as he stepped foot in Los Angeles. He was also surviving by his wits and propelling himself toward a great fortune.

It was OK with us. We loved him because of it. When the Dodgers turned out to be winners, that was all the better. Somehow O’Malley had pulled off the trick of making himself rich, and the city a better place, all at once.

As Korda said of Bludhorn, he made capitalism seem fun. And now that the O’Malley name is soon to be gone, we can remember all that he brought to us so long ago. And regret its passage.

So you see, O’Malley was creating culture and literary legend almost as soon as he stepped foot in Los Angeles. He was also surviving by his wits and propelling himself toward a great fortune.