From the Sports Desk:
I am so happy that today Nelly Korda won the U.S. Women’s Open. She has one of the longest and most elegant swings I’ve ever seen—the kind of swing that can get any golfer into trouble—but she’s machine-honed it. Here’s her driver:
She’s no slouch with iron shots, either. Like this one:
The other thing that made me happy was that this year’s open was played at L.A.’s Rivera Country Club. It was a beautiful day, and every once in awhile they’d break away for a telephoto shot: Marina del Rey, where my wife, Elizabeth, rowed in college, or Venice Beach. Then they’d have to come back to the actual golf, which included a shot down the 18th fairway at the mission-style clubhouse, featured in films and TV shows.
Films and TV shows? But of course. In Pat and Mike, Katharine Hepburn takes to the Riviera driving range to deal with a snotty lady.
I wish this scene, with Cate Blanchett’s excellent Hepburn, was at the Riviera, but it was instead shot at a course in Woodland Hills. But it certainly evokes the more famous golf course. I also love, for some reason, the filter Scorsese used to make the scene kind of bluish. It’s a beautifully shot film. Howard Hughes, evidently, was a member of the Riviera Club
Both Leo and Cate’s swings look a little as if they’re chopping wood. Ben Hogan won the 1950 U.S. Open at the Riviera, and his swing came from practices so grueling that his hands bled. He knew, on the practice tee, that it was time to shift to a longer club, say from an eight iron to a seven iron, when he began repeatedly hitting his caddy in the distance.
One of Riviera’s most accomplished amateurs was also one of my favorite actors–James Garner, he of film and TV (that Pontiac Firebird in The Rockford Files.) Garner’s handicap was five, which is miniscule–like an MLB pitcher with an ERA under 3.00.
Another favorite actor was a member here and used to watch tournaments, sipping bourbon, near a tree on the twelfth hole. Today it’s called “Bogey’s Tree.”
My favorite Riviera story might seem morbid until you consider the man who inspired it. This is the eighth hole at the club, a par four, made tragically famous by one of Bogart’s co-stars, whom he killed, in Casablanca, before the co-star died on the eighth.
Conrad Veidt was a German expatriate, with a long and distinguished career in German Expressionist films, who came to Hollywood because he despised Hitler and the Nazi Party to his core.
He would not have done well had he stayed. He was sexually fluid, in the heady days of the Weimar Republic, when Berlin rivaled Paris as Europe’s most avant-garde city. Writing this reminded me of a scene from the excellent Netflix series Babylon Berlin, with this stunning, very fluid and very avant-garde establishing scene, set at a Weimar-era Berlin nightclub. The song is called Zu Asche zu Staub–“Ashes to Dust.” (The young women with the bananas were borrowed from Paris’s sexiest and most-beloved American entertainer, Josephine Baker, here walking the pet cheetah she adored.)
So, ironically, Veidt escaped Berlin only to become a series of Nazi characters in his Hollywood films–a U-boat commander here, a Gestapo officer, like Casablanca’s Major Strasser, there. And he was on the losing end of one of Hollywood’s biggest put-downs: the wonderful “Marseillaise” scene from the film he made with Bogey.
And Veidt was a golfer, and the Riviera was his club. Sadly, in 1943—about a year after Casablanca was released—Veidt, playing with his doctor, suffered a massive heart attack on the eighth hole and died.
He was not buried in Hollywood, nor in Berlin. His ashes are instead in Golders Green, a London crematorium. This may be why: In 1940, Veidt became desperately worried about the suffering of British children, like those in the photo below, under Hitler’s air attacks—under the “Blitz.” He spent thousands to send London children one-pound tin boxes of hard candy, 2,000 large chocolate bars and greeting cards containing British pound notes.
Conrad Veidt, golfer, actor, was also a supreme humanitarian.
A Work in Progress 