For Jack Kent Cooke II, Life Turned Out to Be Unlivable

When Jack Kent Cooke II was a child growing up in Los Angeles in the 1960s, his grandfather owned a sports empire bigger than a boy could dream, bigger, in fact, than any in American history.

The senior Jack Kent Cooke owned the Los Angeles Lakers, the Los Angeles Kings and the Washington Redskins. He built the Fabulous Forum on a civic dare and brought superstars like Wilt Chamberlain and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to play there.

But the grandfather traded away his Los Angeles holdings for skyscrapers, racehorses and other things. And the young man who was his namesake would never grow up to inherit an empire valued today at more than $1 billion. Instead, he would haunt the Forum that might have been his, wrangling tickets to hockey games, borrowing money to party and invoking his famous name with strangers he sought to befriend.

In January, a few days before the Super Bowl his grandfather’s team had twice won, young Cooke died in his modest Glendale apartment. The coroner concluded on Feb. 16 that he had died of alcoholic liver disease and a related heart condition. He was 26.

No one who knew him thought of him as an alcoholic. Friends described him as a witty, decent young guy who partied too hard. Family members said he had a history of serious kidney problems since childhood and bouts of hepatitis that left him in delicate health.

But the autopsy showed that somewhere along the way, the party man became an alcoholic. And, many friends say, Jack Kent Cooke II died more victim than beneficiary of his famous name.

No one is certain just how it happened, but there are clues.

For one thing, Jack had trouble just learning to write his name. In second grade, he was diagnosed as having a serious learning disability. His mother was so concerned about the lack of help for youngsters like him that she founded the National Center for Learning Disabilities, which is today the major such resource center in the country.

There was something else about his name, something he had learned since childhood: being a Kent Cooke meant you had to make your first million early in life, and make it on your own. Jack couldn’t.

“You could say,” observed Jack’s sister, Jeannie Kent Cooke, a producer at the ESPN sports network, “that my brother’s life is a story about someone from a very well known family who felt a lot of pressure to be more successful than the other males in the family.”

“It’s very, very sad, a damn waste,” said his father, Ralph Kent Cooke, a former Brentwood film and advertising executive. “Who’s to blame? I don’t know, if there is anyone. . . . It’s a tough thing to live under the family name.”

There are dozens of pictures of Jack Kent Cooke in the archives of the Los Angeles Times, several photos of his son, Ralph Kent Cooke, and only one picture of his grandson, Jack Kent Cooke II.

That picture was taken in 1972, when 10-year-old Jackie was seated with his two brothers and sister in a circle around his glamorous young mother, Carolyn Kent Cooke. The photograph accompanied a story about his mother’s charitable works with a headline that summed her up as “Personal Conscience With Clout.”

Her clout stemmed mostly from her father-in-law, Jack Kent Cooke. Kent Cooke had blown down to Los Angeles from Canada, a stubborn, imaginative, self-made man with lots of friends and lots of enemies.

He had pulled himself up by his bootstraps by selling encyclopedias (legend has it to people who couldn’t read) and by playing sax and clarinet in nightclubs. He made his first million by buying up listless Canadian radio stations and revamping them.

When he moved to the United States to play for bigger stakes in the late 1950s, and found laws prohibiting foreigners from owning broadcasting stations, he was made a citizen by an act of Congress.

In rapid fire, he acquired a one-quarter interest in the Redskins, and bought the Kings and the Lakers outright. He built the Forum in Inglewood in 1967 after a dispute with officials who ran the Sports Arena in Los Angeles. He also owned some newspapers, and now owns the Daily News in Los Angeles.

Jackie was 5 years old when the Fabulous Forum opened. While most boys were dreaming of players’ autographs, Jackie watched the athletes work out, talked to them sometimes in the locker room. He saw Elgin Baylor hang motionless in the air years before Michael Jordan’s first name became “Air.” When the Lakers won the NBA title, loudspeakers introduced a man with his own name.

But, like his Canadian grandfather, Jackie loved hockey best. Someday, he dreamed, he would capture the Stanley Cup that was the only prize he knew had eluded his grandfather.

When Jackie was 11, his parents were divorced, and his mother moved to New York and married Pete Rozelle, current commissioner of the National Football League. Jackie moved with them and, by all accounts, developed a close relationship with his stepfather.

That divorce was only a foreshock.

In 1979, Jack Kent Cooke’s bride of 42 years divorced the family patriarch in a settlement that would make the Guinness Book of World Records. Within weeks, Jack Kent Cooke had sold his Los Angeles sports empire to Jerry Buss and moved east.

The younger of his two children, John, would side with him, and is now executive vice president of the Washington Redskins. The eldest, Ralph (Jackie’s father), would side with his wife, and refuse to speak to the senior Cooke for 10 years.

The two reconciled only last year. Ralph, long a race car enthusiast, now runs his father’s Elmendorf Racing & Breeding Farm in Kentucky.

The relationship between grandson and grandfather is not precisly clear. Jack himself often said he had “blown it” with his grandfather, and had been “disowned” by him. However, friends said he also received regular stipends from his grandfather and talked to him occasionally by telephone.

Jack Kent Cooke said in a brief telephone conversation that he felt “pretty badly” about his grandson, and preferred not to be interviewed.

At young Cooke’s funeral in Westchester, N.Y., he was remembered as the impetus for the founding of the National Center for Learning Disabilities in New York in 1977. Jack’s mother, now known as Carrie Rozelle, acted as its president until last year.

Dyslexia was, and in some ways still is, a little-understood condition. Until 1963, the neurologically based group of disabilities often called dyslexia did not even have a name.

Many people with learning disabilities, including Nelson Rockefeller, Cher, Thomas A. Edison and Pablo Picasso, were famous. But studies also show that many suffer from feelings of inferiority. Some develop compensatory behaviors ranging from lying to joking.

The Rozelles declined to be interviewed for this story, but referred a reporter to New York psychologist Dr. Betty Osman, who began seeing Jack when he was a teen-ager.

“He really wanted to succeed, both for his family and for himself,” Osman said. “And, in a sense he did, because he was such a lovely person. But he wanted so much to be great.”

After his death, those who knew him best would ask themselves whether Jack’s failure to succeed--failure even to seem happy--was rooted in his learning disabilities, his splintered family history or some other shortcoming that was Jack’s alone.

The happiest time of Jack’s life, his sister said, was when he attended a private boarding school for learning-disabled teen-agers, where he excelled in sports. Later, he went to Biscayne College in Florida. He was arrested at least once for drunk driving, and left after a year.

In 1982, he moved to Los Angeles and attended Pepperdine University. According to the registrar’s office, he dropped out in 1984.

Gary Galles, assistant professor of economics, described Jack as an affable young man with a “salesman’s personality” and uneven health.

Once, Galles said, Jack “held out the prospect of a bribe” to avoid flunking his public finance class. When that did not work, he said, the young man explained his dyslexia. Galles said he then gave him an exam orally, and he failed because he had not studied.

Before dropping out, Galles said, Jack told him he was making $60,000 to $80,000 a year working for a stockbroker, passing on tips he picked up at parties.

A friend who asked not to be named said Cooke had worked as a “stock analyst” for a time. He did not know where or in what capacity. But others dismiss such statements as the attempts of an insecure young man to impress others.

“He liked to play the big shot,” said his father, Ralph. “He wouldn’t know a good stock tip if he heard one. . . . (After being) put down all those years (as dyslexic) he felt he had to say something in public to his peers.”

A ‘Major Factor’

It is not clear just how serious Jack’s learning disabilities were. Osman said his disabilities clearly were a “major factor” standing in the way of his graduation from college and a successful career.

According to the few friends here who knew about his disability, Jack could not balance his own checkbook and found it painful to write a message on a greeting card. But he kept stats at games and pored over box scores in the paper.

“He was really good at hiding it from everybody,” said Ollon E. Downing, an air traffic controller who was one of his best friends. “Once when he had trouble taking down a telephone number, he tried to make a joke out of it. . . . He didn’t like to talk about it.”

After dropping out of college, young Cooke lived in a luxurious condominium in Santa Monica, and told friends it was rented for him by his maternal grandmother. Friends say he received monthly allowances from his mother and Rozelle, and his grandfather.

He set out to make his own million through a number of money-making schemes friends said ranged from the inspired to the hare-brained. He tried a career in music, his grandfather’s first vocation, spending $15,000 on a video.

“He wanted to show his family he could accomplish something in his own way,” said Lynn Russo of Brentwood, one of his closest friends. “But everybody always thought he could do better.”

One reason for his lack of business success, Russo said, was that he devoted so much time to his friends. With his own family divided by divorce, geography and career goals, she said, Jack became peacemaker and matchmaker for his friends. It was Jack, she said, who brought her and her husband together.

“The problem with Jack was that he never quite found a purpose in life,” his father said. “He was like a lot of kids these days--they want to own businesses and be president of the company before they know anything. . . .

“We were born with that Canadian ethic. We have to make our own way. . . . We don’t just go handing out money, any more than it was handed out to me.”

He told his son to acquire sales experience, and Jack went to work at a music store, and at a car lot.

“When I first met him, I thought, how can a guy with all his connections be working in a used car lot until 9 at night?” said Will Worthington, 28, another acquaintance.

“Then he would go out after that, drinking and partying, playing it fast and easy. Why someone who had so much in store for him down the line wasn’t more responsible for himself, I could never understand.”

Another friend, John Duken, a music store executive, said young Cooke used his father’s card to play golf at his country club, but never felt welcome at his father’s house. “Twice he drove me by his house in Bel-Air,” Duken said. “But we didn’t go in.”

His father, however, said he felt “very close” to his son, and spoke with him weekly. Rozelle and his mother offered “constant emotional and financial support,” his sister said.

Psychologist Osman said the Rozelles “felt badly” that there was “a certain lack of emotional support” of Jack from his grandfather. That emotional distance, combined with his parent’s divorce and the feeling of inferiority that stemmed from his disability, undoubtedly all contributed to his seemingly desperate search for acceptance.

“Learning disabilities themselves don’t do that,” said Osman, who delivered Jack’s eulogy. “Family rejection alone may not do it. But a combination . . . of factors does.”

Jack remained Jack Kent Cooke’s most loyal sports fan. Friends said he would watch every Redskins game he could on television and bet on his grandfather’s horses at Santa Anita. Above all, he loved the Kings.

The Forum his grandfather had built would become the heart of his social life, as well. He called Claire Rothman, president of what is now Jerry Buss’ Forum, for tickets and passes to concerts.

“I felt there was a certain amount of opportunity he was cheated out of because his grandpa no longer owned the Forum,” said Rothman, who knew him as a child. “He was a very sad young man. He had enough connections to knock on doors, but after a while, when he couldn’t deliver, the knock sounded hollow.”

Somehow in the last few years, the part of Jack Kent Cooke II that was nice guy got lost in the part of him that got desperate. Regulars at the Forum Club began to think of him as the guy who laughed a little too loud.

“He was so hungry for friends, for love, that it dictated his life style,” Worthington said. “(I thought) he was a classic case of a child born into a rich family that spends all its time on business and doesn’t give enough time to the kids.”

Kings players who had turned up at his parties “began to stay away--he had a reputation for being too wild,” a staff member said. Last year, when he wanted an initialed Kings hockey stick for his birthday, he had to ask.

Yet, he had real friends, and--although such a thing is difficult for an outsider to measure--a wellspring of love he could, and did, turn to in need.

“The family loved him in their own special way,” Russo said. “Not the kind of love most people would have. (It was) a little bit sad. They were all very much for him. But I think they ran out of patience.”

She said his allowance was cut “way back” to about $25,000 a year. And, to keep up with a life style that included front row seats to concerts and leased Lincoln Continentals, he moved away from the West Side.

Sometime last fall, friends said, he moved into a small, unremarkable apartment in Glendale called the Chateau Louise, where he began to pull himself together.

“He told me he had had problems with (alcoholism),” said his new girlfriend of four months, who asked not to be named. “But he was over that. . . . He’d only drink Coke.”

He and his friend Ollon Downing, the air controller, had come up with a proposal to build and operate a sports bar and hotel in Telluride, Colo. “He was planning on coming out and visiting me to present his idea,” said his father, speaking from Kentucky. He or Jack’s grandfather would have staked them to the idea if it proved reasonable, he said.

But the sports bar was only an interim goal, Downing said.

” . . . All of the business plans were to make enough money to do one thing: to buy the Kings and win the Stanley cup,” he said.

Before ending the interview, Jack Kent Cooke was asked this question: did he know his grandson’s lifelong dream was to buy the Los Angeles Kings?

“Yes,” he said. “But do you know how many boys dream of buying the Los Angeles Kings? There must be 50,000. And more who want to buy the Lakers? And even more who dream of buying the Dodgers?”

Staff writers Ginger Thompson and Esther Schrader contributed to this article.