Thoughts Medley Grace Kelly 31 May 25

by Tony Medley

This morning I was thinking about Grace Kelly. She appeared in a remarkable number of outstanding films during her short Hollywood career (1952-56). The list includes her debut as Gary Cooper’s wife in High Noon (1952), Dial M for Murder (1954), Rear Window (1954), The Country Girl (1954), for which she won an Oscar®, To Catch a Thief (1955), and High Society (1956).

That led me to thinking about my friend an tennis partner, the late Seth Baker. Seth was the youngest person ever to have a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, and made a fortune handling penny stocks, so he retired young. He bought The Racket Club in Palm Springs but didn’t like being a hotelier, so sold it. Wanting to be in an industry that didn’t have to worry about government interference, he bought the flagging Los Angeles Magazine, and turned it into a powerhouse.

Seth told me that when he was living in New York, Grace was his next door neighbor and they were good friends. Seth told me that one night he was sitting at a bar next to a guy who was drunk and complaining that his daughter was seriously involved with a major designer and he didn’t like that. Turns out it was Grace Kelly’s father and as they talked and he found out that Seth was a friend of Grace’s, her father pleaded with Seth to try to influence Grace to stop dating the designer (Oleg Cassini). Seth didn’t want to but the guy kept pressuring him, so Seth did bring the issue up with Grace.

Grace was furious and broke off their friendship. He wasn’t invited to her wedding the Prince Rainier and I don’t think they ever talked again.

Since Seth was a publisher I pitched him an idea about an article on Los Angeles sports broadcasters. He liked it and gave me the assignment. I wrote the article and it was a big hit. So I continued writing for the magazine.

While writing the article I interviewed the two top sportscasters in Los Angeles TV. One was Bryant Gumbel. I was in his office after the article was published (a small cubbyhole at the NBC Studios in Burbank) shortly before he joined The Today Show as co-anchor when the phone rang. Bryant listened and almost fell of his chair laughing. Someone was playing him the infamous recording of Tommy Lasorda reacting the night before to a question by a journalist, “What did you think of Kingman’s performance today?” and Lasorda’s profane response which quickly went viral and has become a classic. For those of you who are unaware of this, this is Lasorda’s answer:

“What’s my opinion of Kingman’s performance? What the [expletive] do you think my opinion is of it? I think it was [expletive]. Put that in. I don’t [expletive] care. What’s my opinion of his performance? [expletive]. He beat us with three [expletive] home runs. What the [expletive] do you mean, ‘What is my opinion of his performance?’ How can you ask me a question like that? I’m [expletive] off to lose a [expletive] game, and you ask me my opinion of his performance?”

I also became friends with Brent Musburger, who was doing local sports for CBS’s O&O station Channel 2 in Los Angeles, and later became a local news anchor. One day after the article was published, I got a call from Brent’s best friend, whose name escapes me. He said he worked for a guy who wrote the TV Sports column for The Hollywood Reporter. He said his boss had seen my article in Los Angeles Magazine  and liked it and asked Brent’s friend if he knew me and he said he did. So, he asked him to call me and see if I wanted to write an article for a special edition of The Hollywood Reporter on TV sports.

I said I did. So I spent hours upon hours interviewing everyone who was anyone involved with TV sports, like head of the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee Peter Ueberroth, Lakers owner Jerry Buss, NBC Executive Director of Sports Don Ohlmeyer, Commissioner of the NBA Larry O’Brien, NFL Director of Broadcasting Val Pinchbeck the list goes on, resulting in a 2,000 word article.

After it was published, I called the guy who recommended me for the article, Bob Seizer, and invited him to lunch to show my appreciation. We met, hit it off and became lifelong friends, having lunch every week for 40 years and playing tennis together all that time.

To end this tale, when I was in high school and my sister was at UCLA, she came home from school and threw a copy of The Daily Bruin down on the dinner table and said, “That’s the best article ever written.” I read it and it was a column by the Sports Editor of the DB about a place kicker who missed an extra point causing the Bruins to lose a chance at the Rose Bowl. After reading it, I decided that when I grew up, I wanted to be Sports Editor of the DB. Several years later, I did become the Sports Editor of the DB.

Bob Seizer and I had lunch for several years before I found out that not only had he also been Sports Editor of the DB, he was the one who wrote the article that so inspired me!