Borne out by Angels

Nobody liked her. They slammed her as cheap and mean, a tightwad former banker with a teller’s personality, married to the sweet old singing cowboy who would have done anything to see his team win the World Series. That was the rap on Gene Autry’s wife, who essentially ran the Angels from 1991 to 1996, when the team was sold to Disney. And as the media turned on her, Jackie Autry, always a private person, simply retreated from the public eye.

Today, four years after the death of the Cowboy, with the Angels in the World Series for the first time, she’s suddenly back in the spotlight.

“She has become a celebrity now that they don’t own the team anymore,” Stan Schneider, the Autrys’ family accountant for 40 years, said with a cackle last week.

Angel fans went wild when she appeared on Edison Field after the team won the American League championship, and outfielder Tim Salmon sprayed her with champagne. She struggled to juggle the endless media requests following that win. And after donning her husband’s number 26 jersey -- awarded to him by the team to symbolize the Angels’ 26th man -- she stepped onto the mound on Saturday to throw out the first pitch of the World Series.

It was a sinker, but no one cared.

This time around, everybody loves her.

‘Owner in training’

Jackie Ellam met Gene Autry when she was vice president at Security Pacific National Bank in Palm Springs, handling the Autry hotel account. Shortly after his first wife died, Gene asked Jackie on a date. He had married his first wife after just three nights out, and he quickly decided he wanted Jackie.

“About two weeks after we started dating, he asked me to come into his office and have a seat,” she recalled. “He asked me, ‘Do you believe in big weddings or small weddings?’ ”

Honorary Hollywood Mayor Johnny Grant, who met Autry in the Army Air Corps in ’44 and later worked in his radio and television stations, said Autry called him on a Sunday morning and asked, “Tiger, do you know a preacher? Jackie and I want to get married today.” Grant replied: “You want me to get you a preacher? It’s Sunday. They’re all working.” But Autry persisted, so Grant went to services at his Methodist church and persuaded his clergyman to perform the ceremony afterward. It was July 1981. She was 39. He was 73.

From the beginning, Gene Autry groomed Jackie to take over the team, sometimes referring to her as the “owner in training.”

Jackie was good raw material: She had played hardball herself as a girl, back in parochial school in Ironia, N.J., and knew the nuances of the game as a player. (She was a center fielder and an “excellent hitter -- the best on the team,” she said.) She was a smart businesswoman who could read spreadsheets and make sound financial decisions. And she was a real sports fan. Before marrying Gene she was a football devotee, able to recite the names of players, their stats and their histories as well as any guy.

When the two of them would go to the games in Anaheim, it was Jackie who went crazy in the owners’ box, while Gene stood by, outwardly stoic. “I’m the screamer and yeller,” said Jackie, who admits she does not like to lose. “He would turn to me and say, ‘Talk to ‘em, baby.’ ”

Grant said it was a good thing Jackie liked baseball -- as did Autry’s first wife -- because Autry wasn’t about to give up the game.

“Being with Gene, and baseball, worked into a great love for her,” added Monte Hale, a close friend of the Autrys and a fellow singing cowboy. Hale said that when they drove home after games, Jackie would put on western music -- Autry or Patsy Cline. “Win or lose, it didn’t make a difference, the four of us would sing,” said Joanne Hale, Monte’s wife.

A 5-year plan

By 1991, Jackie carried the title of executive vice president and was a member of the board of directors. While her control of the Autrys’ holdings had steadily increased, her public profile remained low -- until she began to try to curb the team’s losses by favoring home-grown players over high-priced free agents.

“I sat down in the spring with the beat writers,” she recalled. “I started talking about where baseball was going. I talked to them about the future of baseball, the economics of baseball. I used the word ‘budget.’ This word had never come up in baseball before.”

The team was competitive. She and Richard Brown -- the team president from 1990 to 1996 -- knew there were only two courses of action: grow talent through the farm system with a five-year plan, or spend the money to buy a pennant, like the Florida Marlins did.

Jackie Autry opted for the former, and was brutally specific. “If we try to retain all of our young men that are going to be free agents in the off-season, and try to deal with arbitration as well, we’re going to be losing $8 million to $10 million next year,” she told the Los Angeles Times in a story headlined “Wife of the Angels’ Owner Says Bottom Line Now Must Come First.” “Gene has said, ‘I refuse to raise ticket prices again.’ Well, now you’ve got a problem.”

At a time when no one talked about spiraling player salaries, and it was suggested that many owners would gladly write a $10-million check to see their team win the World Series, her comments amounted to baseball sacrilege. She became the whipping girl for three decades of pent-up Angel-fan frustration.

“Everyone loved Gene. The fans. The players. The owners,” Jackie said. “They all wanted Gene to win a World Series. They thought the best way to do this was a quick fix, to go out and get the players for the Cowboy, because he’s not going to be around next year.”

Jackie disagreed.

“That is where I started being called cheap,” she said. “They said I was not willing to win, I was not willing to go out and get free agents.”

The five-year plan was supposed to reach fruition in 1995, Brown said. That year the Angels tied for the division championship but lost a playoff.

Complete authority

In 1992 Jackie Autry publicly acknowledged that she had been given complete authority by her husband to run the club.

Brown remembers those as difficult times.

“I think Jackie looked at baseball economics as sick,” he said. “I think now -- even Commissioner Bud Selig pointed out eight or nine months ago that out of 30 teams, six teams are on the verge of bankruptcy, 16 to 18 weren’t making money. She could look at it unemotionally. With her head and not her heart. She could see that baseball was not going to get better in the near future.

“Don’t forget, ‘fan’ is short for ‘fanatic,’ ” he added. “A fan looks at a baseball team and they say, ‘I don’t care who owns it. I just want the team to do well. I don’t care if they can’t afford it. Sell it to someone who can.’ ”

Schneider, the family accountant, is more blunt: “She got blamed for things that were never her fault. The ballclub did not cut budgets to the detriment of the team. But because she was not going out and going crazy, everyone said, ‘You are not willing to spend the money.’ It was easy to blame the new woman on the block.”

Jackie Autry stuck to her guns, working with Brown to develop talent on farm teams, traveling the country and scouting for the best. By the time the Autrys sold the Angels to the Walt Disney Co. in 1996 for $140 million (and Disney spent another $98 million to renovate Edison Field), they had built up the beginnings of a good team, including some players on the World Series’ lineup, such as Tim Salmon, Darin Erstad, Garret Anderson and Troy Percival.

“Those who knew what I was going through see my babies out there,” said Jackie, who admits she started bawling when she heard the Angels won the wild-card playoff spot. “I was sitting at home watching them on television and they started jumping up and down and I couldn’t help it. I started to cry. I called my office and they were all crying. My assistant had gone through a box of Kleenex.”

‘She was right’

Jackie Autry is a strong woman. Schneider said if she had been born in another time she would have been a trailblazer in the Wild West. But in the years since the Cowboy died she has devoted her energies almost completely to honoring Gene Autry’s name and memory. She attends Angels’ games like a Little League mother (the Walt Disney Co. allowed her use of the owner’s box at Edison Field for the rest of her life), and blew up two photos of Gene at the height of his career, in his number 26 jersey, and hung them from her box so every fan in the stadium could see. She is chairman of the Autry Museum of Western Heritage, and maintains an office in Studio City to make sure Autry’s music and films stay alive. All this as well as serving as honorary American League president of major league baseball.

“She is the best thing that ever happened to him,” Schneider said. “I’m a personal believer that she kept him alive as long as he lived.”

Some who have watched the Angels head to the World Series say that when the fans go crazy for Jackie Autry, they are cheering for the Cowboy. But many of those closest to her see the team’s arrival after 42 years as a win not just for him, but for his wife.

“She was terribly maligned,” said Joanne Hale, co-founder of the Autry Museum. “I think part of the reason was because she was a woman talking about baseball. But she had good, sound business sense. Everything that she said and espoused has become fact. It is what all the owners are saying now, but she started it. She was right. She was damn right. Her business sense and philosophy relating to baseball was right on track. I want this win for Jackie.”

Publicly, Jackie Autry always speaks of Gene, of how he is looking down and smiling, of how happy he would be if he could just see his team now. But she knows what she did. Privately, she feels vindicated.

“When I threw out the first ball at one of the Seattle games, they were all standing and cheering,” she said. “I don’t think those people understand. I think they see me as representing the Cowboy. They don’t recognize that my way was the right way.”