Having Georgia on my mind

Its members would tell you that it is the most exclusive club in the world. The owners of the 31 National Football League teams come from all shades of society, and came by their fortunes by various means, but they share one thing in common: money.

Robert (Woody) Johnson IV, for instance, who just paid $653 million to buy the New York Jets, is the heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, which puts him in the same category as K S (Bud) Adams, whose money came from family oil interests. Adams' Tennessee Titans, who used to be the Houston Oilers, will play the St Louis Rams, who used to be the Los Angeles Rams, in Super Bowl XXXIV.

Jerry Jones of the Dallas Cowboys and Danny Snyder, who just last year forked over $800 million to buy the Washington Redskins, are self-made millionaires. Jones started out selling shoes to his class-mates at the University of Arkansas and represents a Horatio Algervariety success story, while Snyder's mega-bucks are of a more recent vintage, the result of cyber-investments in the 1990s. The Rooney family of Pittsburgh and the Mara dynasty of the New York Giants are perhaps more typical of old-style NFL ownership. Art Rooney's fortune came from one spectacularly successful weekend at the races in Saratoga back in the 1930s, while the Maras, New York bookmakers who could not resist the $1,000 price of a charter franchise, had boarded the elevator at the ground floor a decade earlier.

They will all be in one room tomorrow night when NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue hosts his annual pre-Super Bowl bash, an exclusive extravaganza for which tickets are nearly as highly-coveted as those for the game itself.

And the unquestioned belle of the ball at this year's soiree will be Georgia Lee Irwin Geiger Johnson Hayes Wyler Rosenbloom Frontiere, aka Madam Ram, the lone distaff member of this otherwise all-male club.

As reviled in California, from whence she moved her football team five years ago, as she is beloved in her new location in St Louis, Madam Ram is a former Las Vegas hoofer who acquired her membership in the club by another traditional American method: she married it.

Although Frontiere outlasted seven husbands, the one that counts is Carroll Rosenbloom, from whom she inherited the Los Angeles Rams after he drowned while swimming off the Florida coast back in 1979. (The griefstricken widow arrived an hour late for her husband's funeral.)

Carroll Rosenbloom had moved in wise-guy circles (he met Georgia through one of her former boyfriends, the famous mobster Meyer Lansky), so it is no surprise that there have been whispers ever since about the mysterious circumstances surrounding his death. By the very next season, Georgia's Los Angeles Rams reached the Super Bowl, which was fortuitously scheduled to be played at the Rose Bowl in nearby Pasadena. Not only was the game held in the biggest-ever Super Bowl venue, but the Rams were entitled to the largest allocation of tickets - those normally set aside for a participating team, as well as to those set aside for host team - but somehow not many of them were made available to the public, even to Rams' season-ticket holders.

There were allegations that the Rams' ownership had scalped tickets in voluminous numbers, and an investigation followed. Although frowned upon by the league, ticketscalping is legal in California, but it developed that no one had paid tax on the profits from the estimated 10,000 resold tickets.

The dragnet failed to pull up Georgia Lee Irwin Geiger Johnson Hayes Wyler Rosenbloom Frontiere, but husband number seven, Dominic Frontiere (whom she had married in seemingly indecent haste following Rosenbloom's drowning "accident"), was charged with income tax evasion. A mild-mannered composer of film scores, Dominic Frontiere also proved to be a stand-up guy. He invoked spousal privilege when invited to implicate his wife on the witness stand. Georgia, for her part, conceded that the missing tickets had at one time been hoarded in her own bedroom, but testified that she had innocently believed her husband was giving them away. In the absence of testimony to the contrary, she walked and Dominic took the fall. Shortly after he was hauled away to a federal penitentiary to serve time for income tax evasion, Georgia divorced him. The terms of the settlement were never disclosed.

Still A bubbly, bouncy blonde at the age of (at least) 72, she prepared for her current tycoon's role by working as a Vegas showgirl, as a nightclub singer, as a TV weather babe, and, of course, as Meyer Lansky's moll. Along the way she acquired the services of John Shaw, now the Rams' president, who has more or less functioned as her personal Rasputin for the past two decades. It was Shaw who engineered the deal that made Madam Ram even richer. Five years ago, after St Louis had failed in its efforts to poach another NFL franchise, the Rams pulled up stakes in Tinseltown and moved to Georgia's hometown.

St Louis had pre-sold $70 million in personal seat licenses and built a $260 million stadium, the Trans World Dome, where the Rams got a sweetheart lease and a deal which now brings in $25 million a year in luxury box and ticket sales alone. Moments after the Rams's 11-6 elimination of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in Sunday's NFC Championship game, Georgia Lee Irwin Geiger Johnson Hayes Wyler Rosenbloom Frontiere stood on a platform at midfield to receive the trophy. She hugged players as Ray Charles' rendition of Georgia On My Mind boomed across the Dome, and Dick Vermeil, the 63-year-old coach she lured out of retirement three years ago, triumphantly proclaimed that "Georgia is going to the Georgia Dome".

According to her birth certificate on file in the Missouri state capitol of Jefferson City, Madam Ram was actually named Violet Francis Irwin when she was born at St Mary's Hospital in 1927. Three years later the certificate was altered and she was rechristened Georgia Lee, which is just as well.

I mean, think about it. Try to imagine Ray Charles singing something called Violet On My Mind. Or imagine the Super Bowl being played in a place called the Violet Dome.