Tough Luck by R. D. Rosen

Author:R. D. Rosen [Rosen, R. D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780802147110
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2019-10-23T16:00:00+00:00

15

Temptations

Sid Luckman had hit the jackpot at 24. He was the right man at the right time with the right team coached by the right coaches using the right system. He was the marquee player of the most powerful team in football, beloved by the NFL’s most esteemed figure, George Halas, and by a rapidly increasing number of football fans, who couldn’t fail to see his name in headlines all across the country on December 9, 1940.

As so often happens with the suddenly famous, Luckman was immediately considered a candidate for other leading roles. In late January, Arch Ward, the Chicago Tribune’s powerful sports editor and columnist, wrote that Luckman was being considered for the leading role in the Chicago company of the new Broadway play My Sister Eileen. The column was accompanied by a cartoon of a theatergoer at the show’s box office saying, “Give me two on the one-yard line.” It was no surprise he didn’t get the part, given that the highlight of his stage career had occurred during the spring of his senior year at Erasmus Hall, when he had grown a mustache to play public-relations guru Grover Whalen, inventor of the ticker-tape parade, the 1939 New York World’s Fair’s official greeter, and a former law-and-order New York City police commissioner who had been forced to resign after his men had used excessive violence to disrupt an International Unemployment Day parade back in 1930.

In the days following the game, the chameleonic Irv Kupcinet stripped off his officiating uniform and resumed his identity as Chicago’s rising, glad-handing nexus of brilliant athletes, entertainers, and politicians. He hosted a party for the Bears and some of his entertainment friends. Some have said that a drawling just-turned-18-year-old from Grabtown, North Carolina, named Ava Lavinia Gardner was among the guests. It’s possible, although it wasn’t until 1941 that her sister Beatrice’s photographer boyfriend took Ava’s photo and plunked it in the window of his studio on Fifth Avenue, where it was discovered by an MGM talent scout. Wherever the two may have met, Gardner was very taken with Luckman. A letter soon arrived at the Luckman residence in Brooklyn, where Sid lived with Estelle during the off-season. Sid was still away when the note came, so Estelle, accustomed to opening his mail in his absence, pulled it from the envelope and read: “Dear Sid, I have the hots for you. Best, Ava Gardner.” “The hots” was a Briticism that had only recently achieved some popularity in America.

The note would have troubled Sid’s young wife even more had she any clue who Ava Gardner was or was going to become. Estelle called her sister-in-law Leona for advice. It’s unlikely Luckman and Gardner ever consummated their initial attraction; by her own account she was a virgin before being briefly married to Mickey Rooney. Gardner was in New York City during the summer of 1941 to audition for MGM at its Ninth Avenue offices; after she returned to her home in North Carolina, she

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