Going to Bat for a Marriage

Article did not play fair, say the Dodgers'golden couple

It was a marriage made in heaven, or at least in the misty regions high over Dodger Stadium and the Hollywood TV studios. Husband Steve Garvey, 31, was the All-Star first baseman for the Los Angeles Dodgers, a player noted for his clean-living dedication to baseball and his zealous devotion to good causes. Wife Cyndy, 30, was the sleek co-host of the highly rated AM Los Angeles TV show.

They were handsome, glamorous and happy, or so the publicity about them relentlessly reiterated; more jaundiced accounts described them as "the Ken and Barbie dolls of baseball."

Then Newsweek, Inc.'s fledgling monthly Inside Sports came out with a profile suggesting that the stresses of the couple's separate careers have produced an uneasy, sexually troubled marriage, confusing to Garvey and frustrating to his wife. The Garveys responded with an $11.2 million suit charging libel and invasion of privacy. By last week, as they took further steps to try to prevent the Los Angeles Herald Examiner from reprinting the article, the former golden couple found themselves embroiled in a raucous legal wrangle that touched on some fundamental constitutional issues.

The Inside Sports article, titled "Trou ble in Paradise," was written by Freelancer Pat Jordan, a former pitcher in the Milwaukee Braves' farm system, who described his baseball experiences in the 1975 book A False Spring. He characterizes Cyndy Garvey in the article as restive at having to subordiate herself to her husband's stardom and to endure the loneliness of his lengthy road trips. "You can't even make love to your husband when you want to," she is quoted as saying.

"You've got to wait for an off day."

She speaks almost longingly of having an affair. Although she finds Steve self-controlled to an irritating degree ("He can't be mussed"), she describes him as "still growing up" emotionally. She recalls refusing to watch TV coverage of his World Series play while she was in the hospital bearing their first child:

"Hell, he didn't come to watch me."

As for Garvey, Jordan writes that he has loved Cyndy "in the same way for ten years, and now that that is no longer enough for her, he is confused."

In their suit the Garveys charge Jordan with breaking an oral agreement to write a "favorable" account of the "special challenges" of their marriage. Instead, they say, his article contains innuendoes, "falsehoods, inventions, gaps and opinions masquerading as facts." Garvey, making an unscheduled appearance on his wife's show, described the profile as "just another opportunity for somebody to take a shot at people who stand up for what we believe in, and that's a strong family, belief in our religion, belief in doing everything we can for people, and I'm tired of it."

The Garveys let their lawyers do the rest of the talking. Their immediate task was to block the Herald Examiner from reprinting the article as a series. As Attorney Alan Rothenberg put it: "They aren't exposing Watergate. They are simply going to reprint someone else's gossip and trash, and at great harm to the Garveys." Rothenberg said that since the appearance of the article on July 28, the Garveys' house has been pelted with eggs and Cyndy has been accosted during a trip to a local ice cream store and has received obscene mail.

The first judge to hear the dispute, Federal District Judge Robert Kelleher, ordered the Herald Examiner not to publish a word until he could read transcripts of the tape-recorded interviews between the Garveys and Writer Jordan. He said that if he found that the documents backed up the couple's charges of falsity and thus bolstered their chances of winning the libel suit, he would extend the ban on republication. Attorneys for the newspaper and for Newsweek, Inc. protested that the judge's order amounted to prior restraint. Turning to the Court of Appeals, they cited half a century of precedent providing that the remedy for 5 libel is to sue for damages afterward, not to prevent publication. The court agreed and threw out Kelleher's order, I clearing the way for the Herald Examiner to run its series this week. (The Garveys' libel and privacy suit might take two years to come to trial.)

The Herald Examiner's victory came too late to beat the competition.

On the morning that the court's decision was announced, the Los Angeles Times appeared with substantial excerpts from the article, including several of the most intimate quotes from Cyndy. If it was any consolation, the Times had earlier supported its rival with an editorial that blasted Judge Kelleher for holding "the Constitution in contempt."

Meanwhile, at his home in Connecticut, Jordan professed bewilderment at the commotion. In fact, soon after the interviews, but before his article appeared, he received a friendly letter from Cyndy, a copy of which was obtained by TIME in Los Angeles. "I feel I may have been off guard, but I also feel nothing said was harmful or flippantly said," Cyndy wrote. "I must tell you Pat--you helped Steve see my need for better communication --hopefully that will lead us toward a path of constructive sharing.''

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