Reviewed by Colman McCarthy
Sunday, July 13, 2008

THE MYSTERIOUS MONTAGUE

A True Tale of Hollywood, Golf, and Armed Robbery

By Leigh Montville

Doubleday. 303 pp. $26

Unlike much of America in the mid-1930s, with the economy nearly comatose from the Depression, Hollywood was thriving. Stars like Cary Grant, Bette Davis and Errol Flynn worked steadily on the huge backlots where the studios ground 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.

Enter a skilled fantasist who called himself John Montague. An actor, though not on the screen, he played a self-assigned role that brought stardom of another kind. In his early 30s and stockily built, he was a golfer who relished big-money games, complete with side bets that he could hit birds on telephone wires 175 yards away. 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, Humphrey Bogart and, for lively and good measure, Howard Hughes, the last tycoon. For a time, Montague roomed with the even burlier actor Oliver Hardy.

"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, Ala., 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 more had he not been taking me to the cleaners.)

Montague was justifiably called 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, and he became known as "the greatest golfer in the world." He once played golf-mad Bing Crosby with a baseball bat, shovel and garden rake. After Montague won the first hole, Crosby crooned that he'd had enough and quit.

The mystery man was exposed in 1937. Despite his no-photos policy, a picture of Montague had accompanied the Time article, which was seen by the police in Elizabethtown, N.Y., in the Adirondacks. Montague's real name was LaVerne Moore, and he was wanted on a seven-year-old charge of armed robbery.

Montville's account of this masquerader is a well-paced ride that bumps along between high courtroom drama and low-grade farce. The national media swooped into Elizabethtown during the ensuing trial, 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 trial lawyer who once won an acquittal for gangster Dutch Schultz. Suddenly a tabloid celebrity and no longer shy around the cameras, he lost little time in using his propulsive energy for self-promotion. He and Babe Ruth, joined by two female golfers of note -- Babe Didrikson and Sylvia Annenberg -- staged an exhibition match on Long Island. The crowd was so large and unruly that the match was halted after nine holes.

Afterward, Montague returned to Hollywood. "The Garbo of Golf, the Sphinx of the Links, the Phantom of the Fairways," writes Montville, "had to get going, get busy, put up, yes, or shut up. The legend had to be fortified by facts to stay alive." He entered the 1939 U.S. Open but failed to qualify. The next year he made it into the field but shot a weak 77 and 73, missing the 36-hole cut. He was derided by the media that had once enthroned him.

Montville provides scant details on how Montague earned a living from the 1940s until his death in Studio City in 1972. Those were evidently parched years for him, so perhaps there wasn't much to tell. At the end, the former "greatest golfer in the world" had been subsisting on social security and welfare checks. ·

Colman McCarthy is the director of the Center for Teaching Peace and the author of "At Rest with the Animals," to be published in August.