Georgia Frontiere Rams’ owner, dead at age 80.
January 20th, 2008 | by Kevin Morris |
By
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
Georgia Frontiere was a chorus girl, a club singer, a philanthropist and a
creative eccentric who wrote poetry and liked astrology.
She dined with movie stars and sang at Joseph P. Kennedy’s mansion. At various
times, she owned homes in London, Los Angeles, New York, Arizona and her native
St. Louis.
She married seven times. For 29 years she owned a franchise in the ultimate
“old-boys league” — the National Football League — and during that time the
Rams earned 13 playoff berths and appeared in three Super Bowls.
As her son, Dale “Chip” Rosenbloom, said: “She’s led an extraordinary life.”
Mrs. Frontiere, who died Friday after a long battle with breast cancer, took
over the Los Angeles Rams in 1979 after her sixth husband, Carroll Rosenbloom,
drowned in a swimming accident. Against league wishes, she moved the franchise
to her hometown in 1995.
After four consecutive losing seasons in St. Louis, the Rams pulled off one of
the more improbable championship runs in NFL history. Coming off a 4-12 season
in 1998, the Rams went from worst to first in 1999.
With a dominating, electrifying offense headlined by quarterback Kurt Warner,
running back Marshall Faulk and wide receivers Isaac Bruce and Torry Holt, the
team known as “the Greatest Show on Turf” went 13-3 in the regular season and
then defeated Tennessee 23-16 in Super Bowl XXXIV.
As she accepted the Lombardi Trophy from NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue, Mrs.
Frontiere fired the shot heard ’round St. Louis.
“It proves that we did the right thing in going to St. Louis,” she said on the
trophy stand.
It was Tagliabue, after all, who had tried to block the move of the Rams from
Southern California.
The day after the Super Bowl, 100,000 Rams fans stayed into the dark for a
victory parade and rally at Kiener Plaza. As the motorcade rolled by on the
parade route, tears rolled down Mrs. Frontiere’s cheeks as fans shouted, “We
love you, Georgia!” And, “Thank you, Georgia!”
“You are so wonderful,” Mrs. Frontiere told the crowd. “I love you. I’m so
happy I could bring my team to my people.”
Mrs. Frontiere was born Georgia Irwin on Nov. 21, 1927, at St. Mary’s Hospital
in Richmond Heights. She grew up in St. Louis’ Central West End and attended
Hamilton School, where she was known for her blond curls and strong soprano
voice. Some of her favorite childhood memories were of trips to the Muny Opera,
picnics in Forest Park and skating at the old Winter Garden Rink.
“I also played sandlot or gravel lot football, until the boys got too big,”
Mrs. Frontiere once said. “To this day, when I see a wide receiver catch the
ball, I remember and relate back to my childhood experiences.”
Her parents were divorced in 1943, about which time Mrs. Frontiere, her mother
and her brother, Ken, moved to Fresno, Calif. By then, Mrs. Frontiere already
had been married once, at age 15, to a Marine. The family quickly had the
marriage annulled.
In California, she was married only a few weeks to her second husband, Francis
J. Geiger, before he was killed in a car-bus crash in 1946. Mrs. Frontiere was
also in the car at the time but was not seriously injured.
In California, she was a chorus girl for the Sacramento Music Circus. She moved
to Miami with her fourth husband, Wallace Hayes, in the mid-1950s. She worked
as a “weathergirl” for a Miami television station and later became a singer at
Miami-area clubs.
In south Florida — at the Palm Beach mansion of Kennedy, father of U.S.
President John F. Kennedy — she met Rosenbloom. In those days, Mrs. Frontiere
could be seen singing at piano bars in New York hotels. She would accompany
Rosenbloom to Kennedy’s home in Hyannisport, Mass., to sing there as well.
Once Rosenbloom made his unprecedented “swap” of franchises, in essence trading
his Baltimore Colts for the Los Angeles Rams in 1972, Mrs. Frontiere quickly
embraced the Hollywood scene. The top actors and entertainers of the day, such
as Jimmy Stewart, Cary Grant, Ricardo Montalban and Jack Benny, were among her
dinner guests.
Known for her tardiness, Mrs. Frontiere was accustomed to being the center of
attention. An astrology buff, she once attributed back-to-back losses by the
Rams during the 1999 Super Bowl season to the fact that “Mercury was in
retrograde.” Or so the story went.
A few months after Rosenbloom drowned, Mrs. Frontiere made sports headlines by
firing her stepson, Steve Rosenbloom, who had been widely expected to take over
the club. As the first woman to own and run an NFL team, Mrs. Frontiere was
subject to immediate criticism.
“It took a tremendous amount of courage, really, from the moment she inherited
the team,” Rams President John Shaw said.
As early as the 1979 season, her first year owning the club, there were signs
at home games reading, “Georgia, Please Sell.” But she didn’t.
As a woman in a man’s world, she was viewed as a gold-digger, called a chorus
girl and was blamed for the move of the team from Los Angeles to Anaheim — a
move that was conceived and planned by her husband.
“Back then, the smoke-filled rooms didn’t have women in them when they were
doing stuff,” said Jay Zygmunt, Rams president of football operations-general
manager.
Or as Mrs. Frontiere once said: “The owners knew me as a wife but couldn’t
accept me as one of them.”
In 1980, she married Dominic Frontiere, a friend and personal lyricist, who had
written and arranged music for more than 85 movies and television shows,
including “The Flying Nun,” “That Girl” and “The Fugitive.” Dominic Frontiere
pled guilty in 1986 to lying to a government official, a conviction that
stemmed from federal tax evasion charges for scalping tickets to the 1979
season’s Super Bowl. The Frontieres were divorced in 1988.
In 1986, Mrs. Frontiere held a reunion for her elementary school classmates in
St. Louis before a Rams-Cardinals game. Since the franchise moved here, those
classmates have been invited guests to all home games, even games that Mrs.
Frontiere did not attend.
Growing up, Mrs. Frontiere said she dreamed of becoming an opera star in
Europe, and thus making her hometown proud. She recalled those childhood dreams
on Jan. 17, 1995, when announcing plans to move the Rams to St. Louis.
“Well, now I’ve done something to make St. Louis proud,” Mrs. Frontiere said at
the time. “I’ve brought the city a football team. I’ve given them something
that’s hard to get. I’ve worked hard for it. It’s like bringing a medal back
home.”
The move came at a price, and it enriched Frontiere and the Rams. St. Louis
spent millions to lure the team with a financial package that included a new
domed stadium and a lucrative lease that was the envy of the NFL.
League owners initially rejected the move in March 1995. With the help of Shaw
and others, Mrs. Frontiere’s resolve showed that she had evolved from her
flamboyant “Hollywood girl” days.
“This is not a question of money. It’s pride,” Mrs. Frontiere said after the
league’s initial rejection of the move. “I feel like I can field a winning
team. And I love the game. Carroll knew that I loved the game, and he wanted me
to remain in it.
“It was the closest thing to his heart, next to me. He told me to never sell
the team. I wish others would accept that. Too many people have tried to
pressure me to sell the team.”
Only the threat of a lawsuit, coupled with increased financial payments by the
Rams to the league, caused team owners to reverse field and approve the move
just a month later in April 1995.
Mrs. Frontiere quickly became active in St. Louis charitable activities after
the move. The Rams Foundation has donated more than $6 million in grants,
merchandise and tickets to St. Louis-area charities since its inception in 1997.
Long a champion of music and the arts, Mrs. Frontiere served on the boards of
the St. Louis Symphony and St. Louis Zoo. For many years, Mrs. Frontiere
provided a $5,000 scholarship to area students who created a winning
illustration in the team’s annual art competition, with the winning drawing
gracing the cover of that year’s media guide.
During the days of the Greatest Show on Turf, Mrs. Frontiere was a regular at
Rams home games, frequently going down to the sidelines late in the game.
But the sideline visits and her time spent in St. Louis decreased with
advancing years and declining health. She spent most of her time in Sedona,
Ariz., with her companion of many years, Earle Weatherwax, who never became
husband No. 8. “We’ve both done that,” Weatherwax once said when asked if
marriage was in their future.
