Quite A Gal

As golf season is in full swing around here, I have to report that it was never my sport.  I tried and I tried.  I took lots of lessons and loads of ladies’ golf clinics from Pat Goss- our country club’s terrific assistant pro at the time- to absolutely no avail.  I stunk.  (I even lost the shortest drive contest to my sister-in-law’s mother.)  I couldn’t get arrested on the golf course.  Lousy hand-eye coordination, I guess.

(Pat did go on to the fame and fortune and the better students that he so richly deserved, however.  He left our club to become golf coach at Northwestern University and thus mentor to Luke Donald- currently ranked #5 in the world.)

But Pat did have a few good women golfers under his tutelage at one time. There were several at the club who really knew their way around the links.  They could have played off the men’s tees any time.

And whenever I think about great lady golfers, one especially springs to mind.  She hailed from Detroit.  And she had been Women’s Club Champion on her home course, as I recall.

And even though she wasn’t technically a member of our club- her transplanted daughter Betsy and son-in-law Jimmy were- she visited them often.  She had so many of her own friends there that she was kind of an honorary member.

Her real name was Beth.  But no one ever called here that.  Her nickname was Babs.  And it suited her right down to the green.

Babs.  Breezy and outgoing and fun-loving and sporty.  She was a 1940’s Pat and Mike slacks-wearing movie heroine- when they made them tough-talking and threw in a heart of gold for good measure.

Let me introduce you.  To begin with she looked exactly like Celeste Holm.

For you youngsters out there, if you don’t know who this actress is check her out in High Society, The Tender Trap or All About Eve.  She also hit one out of the park in a personal favorite of mine, A Letter to Three Wives.  But that movie won’t do you any good, because as the trouble-making, marriage-wrecking anti-heroine Addie Ross, Miss Holm was just the sly, silky voice of the movie’s narrator.  You never actually saw her.  (Did you really think that “Desperate Housewives” invented that device?) 

When I first met her back in 1982, she had already been a too-young widow for quite a while.  Although I couldn’t keep up with her on the golf course, we bonded and became fast friends over old movies.

Babs loved movies.  And she knew alot about them.  I was presented to her as someone who had plenty of movie trivia under my belt.  But Babs wasn’t born yesterday.  She was hard-nosed and opinionated when it came to judging movie “experts.” She wanted to kick a few tires.  She tested me.  Hard.  I’ll never forget it.

But I must have passed because she became a friend and a big cheerleader from then on.  I had made the team.

A note here about Betsy’s dad, Malcolm, AKA Mickey.  I never had the pleasure of meeting him.  He died at fifty, I think.  But from what Jimmy, Betsy, her sister Connie, and Connie’s husband- another Jimmy- said, he was one helluva of a guy.  Irreplaceable.

And so Babs didn’t.  She never remarried.  And she kind of took over for her fella when it came to customer entertaining, running the family business- and the family.

Babs’ larger-than-life personality dominated any room she played in.  Whether it was on the golf course, in Palm Springs- her winter home away from home- or Las Vegas.

What happened in Vegas…was Babs.

This was her kind of town.  She was the unofficial First Lady, and if she took you under her wing there, the house odds were in your favor of having a blast.

Two Babs stories:  Palm Springs.  Well, Tamarisk Country Club to be exact.  She invited me to lunch there. Great, naturally.  (First time I ever had lavash crackers.  I have loved them ever since.)

Babs was being Babs and running the whole show.  She insisted that I try the aforementioned crackers, among other things.  (And when Babs insisted, it took a much tougher personality than mine to say no).  The waiter had been hovering solicitously all through the luncheon.  He wasn’t being obsequious or overbearing.  Just doing his job- and doing it damn well for one demanding customer.

But he wasn’t put off.  He was amused by her high jinx.  I could tell.  He had caught her act many, many times before and he dug it.  Finally he came up to the table and said with a smile, “Anything okay with you, Mrs. L?”

We cracked up.  She was bossy, alright, but we all loved for it.

The other story she told me herself.  She was entertaining a large contingent of very important Japanese mucky-mucks in Las Vegas in connection with the family automotive business.  She knew Vegas, as I said, like the back of her hand, and she wanted to do it up right.  But where to take them that would suitably impress and show them that their business was esteemed?

She took them to  a Japanese restaurant.  As the large party was being seated, Babs kept trying to “duke” the maitre d’ who was seeing to all their comforts.

The maitre d’ kept refusing her money.  She kept trying to stuff a wad into his tux pocket.  And he kept brushing her hand away saying it really wasn’t necessary.

But Babs, being one of the honorary “boys,” knew that it was the right thing to do, and so she kept at it until a properly-large gratuity would be accepted.

There was a skirmish.

Finally, the very polite Japanese gentleman had to save face- at the cost of hers.

“Mrs. L.  I can not accept your money,” he explained exasperatedly.  “I am not the maitre d’ of this establishment.  I am one of your guests!”

She roared when she told me this.

They don’t make them like Babs any more.

Not even in Detroit.