The Mysterious Montague (Review)

THE MYSTERIOUS MONTAGUE

A True Tale of Hollywood, Golf and Armed Robbery

By Leigh Montville

Doubleday 257 pp. $26

By COLMAN McCARTHY,

who is the director of the Center for Teaching Peace

and author of “At Rest with The Animals” due in August.

Unlike much of America in the mid-1930s, with the country near comatose from the Depression, the economic health of Hollywood thrived. Stars like Charlie Chaplin, Bette Davis and Errol Flynn were on the huge back lots of studios grinding out film after film that the public craved as distractions from reality. Movieland was fantasy land. “Strip away the phony tinsel of Hollywood and you’ll find the real tinsel underneath,” cracked good-timer Oscar Levant. (p. 28)

Into town about then came John Montague, not an actor on the screen but one with a self-assigned a role that brought stardom of another kind. He was a golfer, stockily built in his early 30s who relished big money games including side bets that he could hit birds on telephone wires 175 yds. out. He earned enough money, and downed enough crows, on Los Angeles public courses to join the private Lakeside Golf Club, becoming the club champ in 1935. Fellow members included Bing Crosby, W.C. Fields, Douglas Fairbanks and Humphrey Bogart--and for lively and good measure, Howard Hughes, the last tycoon.

“John Montague fit perfectly into this scene with its equal parts alcohol, golf, testosterone and madcap bravado,” writes Leigh Montville in this sprightly vivisection of an era and a golfer whose exploits are all but forgotten in the Age of Tiger. The last time I remember anyone gabbing about Montague was 1959 when as a college golfer I played a money match in Point Clear, Alabama against Titanic Thompson, then near the end of a legendary career as golf ‘s heaviest and wiliest gambler. Titanic spun some stories about Montague, which I would have enjoyed had he and his traveling pro not been taking me to the cleaners.

Montague was tagged mysterious in a 1937 Time magazine article. He refused to be photographed, he sought no publicity, never spoke of his past and played in no tournaments even though he regularly scored in the low or mid-60s. Grantland Rice, the dominant sportswriter of the time, hailed him as a supreme talent. Montague became known as “the greatest golfer in the world.” He once played golf-mad Bing Crosby with a baseball bat, shovel and garden rake. He won the first hole, and Bing crooned he had enough and quit.

Montville, a former columnist for the Boston Globe and former writer for Sports Illustrated, tells these stories ably. But when he puts in quotations the remarks of people who knew Montague, or quotes Montague himself, and does so without attribution, citing sources or footnotes, I was left wondering: short of some sort of sports writing omniscience, how does he know he had the exact words uttered more than 70 years ago? For example, there is this exchange with Crosby, evidently in the grille room at Lakeside: “I’ll tell you what,” [Montague] said. “I could beat you with a shovel, a baseball bat, and rake. You use your own clubs.”

“For how much?” Crosby asked.

“Five bucks a hole.”

“You’re on.” (p. 43, 44)

The mystery man was exposed in 1937. A photograph that went with the Time article was seen by the police in Elizabethtown, New York, an upstate burg in the Adirondacks. Montague was really Laverne Moore, wanted for armed robbery seven years earlier. Montville’s account of the local boy returning home as either a prodigal son or native son is a well-paced ride that bumps along between high courtroom drama and low grade farce. The national media swooped in, with Bob Considine of the New York Mirror saying: “The little town is like a college station on the eve of the big game, with lights in the dormitories and songs in the pub.”

Montague-Moore beat the rap, defended by the same lawyer who once won an acquittal for gangster Dutch Schultz. He returned to Hollywood and his celeb pals, but the glory days would soon pass during the war years. He died of a heat attack in l972 in Studio City, where, Montville says sadly, he had been subsisting on social security and welfare checks.