- - Book excerpt: "American Kings: A Biography of the Quarterback"

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Excerpt from: "American Kings: A Biography of the Quarterback"

A Northwest Montana ranch is a strange place for a self-constructed monument to almost everything that's happened to the country since the early 1940s. But that's where it is, in one of the last pieces of mythic America: Stevensville, Montana, the state's first settlement, a town an hour outside Missoula. I wind through the Bitterroot Valley, with views of the Sapphire Mountains, and near the top of the development line, there's a two-level brown home, cased with racks of antlers and stacked logs. A weathered floor mat greets you:

Buck and Etta invite me in. They're in their sixties now, California transplants. They met through his parents: Bob Waterfield and Jane Russell—the country's best quarterback and most famous pinup actress in the 1940s, a unit, an archetype, nicknamed RussField, a power couple before the idea existed. Buck leads me through the living room to a hallway downstairs. Walls are lined with posters of Jane's movies and Bob's games, a testament to what they were and what they meant. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, with Russell and Marilyn Monroe; the Cleveland Plain Dealer from December 17, 1945, Waterfield's rookie year, when he won league MVP and an NFL championship. Russell's most famous photograph, from The Outlaw, lying in hay with her blouse draped off her shoulder, sultry and dangerous; the family surrounding Waterfield's bust at his Hall of Fame induction.

Their life was something out of a lost America. Dad and Mom would pile Buck and his two older siblings into the car and drive into Hollywood, which was quickly emerging as America's eye candy, and get the best table at every restaurant—especially at Charley Brown's Steakhouse, their favorite. The earliest iterations of paparazzi would wait outside. Bob and Jane didn't ask to be treated differently; the world did it out of obligation and recognition. Fame was changing. Gossip columns were not new—they date back to the nineteenth century—but were gaining popularity. Back then, photographers asked permission to take a shot. Most of the time Waterfield said yes. Sometimes he said no. The photographers were polite. Bob had a temper. Everyone knew it. After dinner they'd drive home, curving up and over Benedict Canyon, with its roller coaster quality, to 14888 Round Valley Drive in Sherman Oaks, perched high up, just off Mulholland, west of Beverly Glen, about a mile and a half from the town deli. The design of Jane and Bob's house was of that era, intended to feel weightless, floating above and looking over. "A house in the clouds," in Bob's words. Once home, Buck says, the night started. Friends rolled in, from football and film. Clark Gable. Gene Autry. Judy Garland. Bob Hope. Mickey Rooney. Robert Mitchum. Bing Crosby. John Wayne. People who changed America with black-and-white images and stories. A young Rams public relations staffer named Pete Rozelle once attended a Waterfield party. He played pool with Jane, and later called it the highlight of his early professional years. Buck became accustomed to the smells of booze and smoke, of falling asleep to the sound of adults laughing. He knew why his mom was famous. She was on billboards and in magazines and theaters. His dad was different. Bob was quiet, rarely talking about himself or what he did for a living. Buck had to hear about his dad's exploits—his legend—from others, but a hint was as basic as his name. At Rams practice, Waterfield could throw a football into a bucket across the field. That earned him a nickname: Buckets. His youngest son was named after him.

Buck, for short.

# # #

One day, Waterfield was walking the hallways of Van Nuys High, decades before it became Hollywood's default shooting location for school scenes. He was a senior, class of 1938, monitoring the halls. He stopped a group of girls.

"Where's your pass?"

"Here," Jane Russell said, showing it to him.

She knew his face, that face: dark wavy hair, a low brow over gray-green eyes, a face without doubt. He was slim and maybe six feet. She was a freshman. She had seen him before, at a house party a few weeks earlier. He had been leaning in a doorway at the party, unbothered and cool, and over the course of the night, what Jane saw was the profile of many star quarterbacks in the coming eighty years: He disappeared frequently into a bedroom, each time with a different girl.

"Oh," Bob, said, looking at Jane's pass. "How about a date?"

"That depends."

"On what?"

"On where, when, and why."

"Oh," he said with a smirk.

Two years later, she was at the beach, and there he was. He was a student at UCLA, on a gymnastics scholarship. After hours he'd sneak over to watch the Bruins football team practice, imagining himself out there. He eventually tried out for football in 1941 and made the team. His gifts were evident. He could run, kick, punt, cover—and, by god, throw. By '42, he was a star. Robert not only noticed Jane at the beach, he remembered her. Something about his presence flummoxed her, a feeling that never faded. She felt "hypnotized by a green-eyed snake." She wrote in her diary that she'd met "B.W." and that night, Jane saw him again. They sat together in his car. He put his arm over her shoulder, then moved in for a kiss, provoking a sensation in her that "stayed with me for more than twenty years."

It wasn't that way for him. He liked her, sure, eventually loved her, if he admitted it, which he often would not. He was obsessed with winning and losing, even in casual conversation. If he saw her hurt, if he made her cry, some savage and ruthless instinct kicked in, and he would see how deep he could cut. Waterfield was born in Elmira, New York, on June 21, 1920, but the family moved to the San Fernando Valley when he was an infant. His dad, Stanton, owned and operated a storage company, until heart problems took him in 1930. Bob was nine years old, and he learned how to survive by certain codes: Never discuss loss. Show zero emotion. And win. Jane noticed that he was spoiled. He lived at home with his mother, Frances. Jane's father had died too—when she was in high school. She later wondered if that was why they were drawn to each other, two broken kids who sought careers where success depended on limitless love and approval from strangers. Knowing who they were about to become, it's remarkable to picture them as two young people looking for something as basic as to love and be loved, and to be able to commiserate with someone who understood. But of course, that's what they were doing. Robert—she was the only one who called him by his full name—had leverage over her by virtue of his job. If things didn't work out between them, even for only a night, he had options. She knew it. So did he.

# # #

On December 12, 1942, Waterfield's UCLA Bruins played USC, a crosstown rivalry with a Rose Bowl at stake. Week leading up, the game dominated headlines, alongside and even eclipsing the war. News broke in a gossip column that a relationship between Jane Russell and actor John Payne was over. "Looks like John Payne is plumb out of luck romantically," while Russell was set to "resume with her one-time sweetiepie, Bob Waterfield!"

Pearl Harbor had closed out 1941. The country was in a "survival war," in Franklin Roosevelt's words, in both the Atlantic and Pacific. Most Americans were being asked to contribute to the country with their lives or jobs or time. University of Kentucky professor Tracy Campbell noted in his 2020 book, The Year of Peril: America in 1942, that the word democracy was used more often in printed material in 1942 than any other year in our history, even after 9/11. The country was desperate for good news—and for people to fall in love with. The transformation of Los Angeles, from a destination for people in need of a fresh start into a place of glamour, was in its infancy. UCLA was having its best season, led by its first-team all-conference quarterback. Waterfield threw for 1,033 yards and 12 touchdowns, and he platooned on defense, too, playing in 557 out of 600 minutes during the ten-game season. Week of the USC game, the Los Angeles Evening Herald and Express splashed Waterfield's photo on its front page, wearing number 7, and wrote that USC was "sleepless" over Waterfield's passing. In the Examiner was a feature titled "Snapped From Every Angle": Waterfield surrounded by five cameramen as he posed, ready to fire. Russell was attending two drama schools, modeling, and working as a receptionist. Howard Hughes and his assistants sifted through a stack of photos of models, looking for a heroine for his next film, a western called The Outlaw. "Give this Jane Russell a test," he said. She passed. Hughes paid a photographer $2,500 to spend an afternoon photographing Jane rolling around on a stack of hay, holding a pistol, blouse straps at her arms, revealing just enough. LIFE magazine published the photo in advance of the film. Jane Russell was famous, and even though the film itself was mired in a censorship battle, she was one of America's first sex symbols, a movie star before she had even appeared on-screen.

Waterfield and Russell were engaged for most of 1942, under the strain of youth and fame and ambition. Robert had side girls. Jane decided that if he was going have flings, she would too, and so she found Payne, a noir film actor. One day Russell realized that she was late. Neither she nor Waterfield wanted a child. They weren't married and were just beginning their careers. Robert drove Jane to a nondescript clinic in the Valley. She entered, "cold turkey—no anesthetic—into hell," she later said. And it didn't take. The second one left her unable to conceive.

Waterfield rarely visited her as she recovered; when he did, he said little and left quickly. She dumped him, telling him that they both knew he was happiest alone. She gave him his ring back. He chucked it.

But they ended up back together, two people who were experiencing a certain kind of life at warp speed with no time to think or consider. The day of the UCLA–USC game, Jane was walking through the Los Angeles Coliseum parking lot. She saw Bobby Robertson. He was USC's quarterback and one of her boyfriends— she had a type. Robertson waved to her.

"Hi," Jane replied. "Good luck, but I hope we win."

Her allegiances were clear. Waterfield ran for one touchdown and passed for another in a victory, sending the Bruins to their first Rose Bowl. The next day, the front page of the Herald and Express blared "BRUINS WIN 14–7," above the latest news from World War II. Football and war had already been linked. Now quarterback—which had originated as two words, then was hyphenated, then made whole, made iconic—was synonymous with fame and sex appeal. It was now a job to covet. It was now a thing that was not just about what happened between the lines. And it now came with pressure.

# # #

Bob Waterfield and Jane Russell married in Vegas on April 23, 1943, an epic cultural collision. "ACTRESS BRIDE OF FOOTBALL STAR"; "JANE RUSSELL WEDS BOB WATERFIELD, UCLA GRID PLAYER"; "BOB WATERFIELD MARRIES BEAUTIFUL JANE RUSSELL." A few months later, there was a splashy film premiere in Hollywood. The papers ran a collage of the attending stars. Robert and Jane were at the center, he in a suit and she in a dark jacket, smiling arm in arm. The caption noted that they were a "popular twosome."

There have been other famous college quarterbacks, ones that spawned more of a regional mania, but no college quarterback ever has been in Waterfield's social circles. He was friends with Bob Hope, whom Jane adored; Frank Sinatra, who Jane thought was a gentleman; and Dean Martin, who Jane thought was an asshole. In June of 1944, after a year in the army, Waterfield got a Western Union telegram from Charles Walsh, the general manager of the NFL's Cleveland Rams. "Will pay you $4,000 to play this season plus $200 to cover traveling expenses to and from California provided you report August 12, opening date of training camp." Waterfield opted to stay in California; Russell's career was exploding. The papers called her the "most photographed woman in the world," and she earned $50,000 for a romance called Young Widow. But Rams owner Dan Reeves saw a flight out of orbit in Waterfield and Russell. He upped his offer. This time, Waterfield accepted. The Rams had a quarterback, but they also had something just as vital: a story. Speaking to the Cleveland News, Walsh acknowledged that the team had hired two stars for the price of one.

# # #

The notoriety Waterfield had received in LA prepared him for being the face of the team. Before the 1945 season, there was a cartoon of him in the paper—Big Number 7 of the Rams—and there was his face, clean and glistening, under wavy hair and wearing a perfect smile. A runner, passer, and punter, with stars and stripes and a degree, married to her. First game, first victory, 21–0 in exhibition over Washington, his name in every headline: "WATERFIELD PACES RAMS"; "WATERFIELD STARS AS RAMS BAG FIRST VICTORY"; "WATERFIELD BIG HERO" . . . Waterfield was creating as he went, and his throwing—he was "Mr. Forward Pass," per the Sporting News—shook the league, picking up from where Benny Friedman had left off.

The second game of the season, against the Chicago Bears, was hyped as a "pitchers' duel" between Sid Luckman and Waterfield. Along with coaches George Halas, Clark Shaughnessy, and Ralph Jones, Luckman was a pioneer in the T Formation motion, with three running backs lined up behind the quarterback and a man shifting laterally and behind the line of scrimmage. Like most of football's evolutions, it originated somewhere other than the professional leagues, its earliest iterations from Walter Camp in late 1882. Author Murray Olderman argued in his book The Pro Quarterback that the modern T Formation came out of the National Recovery Administration in 1933, one of several inventions intended to create excitement and lift the country out of the Depression. Don Faurot, Missouri's head coach, turned the T into the Split T, origin of the option play. The Split T was first used three months before Pearl Harbor and sixteen months after Germany changed military tactics forever by rushing across France and Europe. It was designed to turn the quarterback into some-thing of a general. When Luckman arrived in Chicago, the Bears playbook had hundreds of designs from the T Formation, with hundreds of variations in the playbook and seemingly hundreds more in the imagination. Luckman loved the formation, not only because it was innovative and blessed the quarterback with the gift of decision-making, but because it protected him better than other offenses. Using it, Chicago won the NFL championship 73–0 over Washington in 1940. Three years later, Luckman threw seven touchdowns in one game and had 13.9 percent of his passes go for six for the entire season, a mark that still stands. In all, he won four championships.

Facing Luckman in 1945, Waterfield threw two touchdown passes and kicked a field goal, embarrassing Luckman at Wrigley Field: 17–0. It was the beginning of something. For the season, Waterfield completed 52 percent of his passes for 1,609 yards, with 14 touchdown passes and another five on bootlegs, a play he had invented in college, where he faked a run and tucked the ball at his hip. He threw for more yards and touchdowns than Sammy Baugh, with fewer completions and attempts. He led the league in punting and kicking and even played a game at defensive end. He was named Rookie of the Year and All-Pro.

But it was them, this couple—Waterfield and Russell, living at the St. Regis in Cleveland—that swept through the nation's consciousness. Headlines read: "MRS. ROBERT WATERFIELD (JANE RUSSELL OF MOVIES) IS TOPS IN HOUSEWIFE ROLE" . . . "AT HOME WITH THE WATERFIELDS" . . . where writers, in unironic prose, noted him teaching her how to grip a football and hold a placekick, where she cooked on a three-burner stove, helped him shave, and lit his pipe, where he planted "a dreamy kiss on a domesticated Jane, who nevertheless keeps a steady hand in pouring out the coffee."

The Rams reached the 1945 championship, where they faced Washington—Waterfield versus Sammy Baugh—at Cleveland Municipal Stadium. Before the game started, Waterfield signed a new three-year contract worth $20,000 annually, making him football's highest-paid player. It was two degrees when players warmed up. Waterfield had plenty of two of the essential qualities for a great quarterback in a big game: skill and luck. Late in the first half, with Washington up 7–2, he faked a handoff and faded deep into the pocket, drifting as much as dropping back. When he hit his back foot, he threw long and over the middle to receiver Jim Benton for a 37-yard touchdown. Waterfield's extra point was deflected, flopping low toward the uprights. It hit the crossbar—and bounced over. Waterfield would throw another touchdown pass in the second half, but that kick ended up as the difference in a 15–14 win.

After the game, Waterfield drove all night to meet Jane in Los Angeles for Christmas. Once there, he received a telegraph announcing that he had won league MVP. Photographers snapped a shot of Robert and Jane jointly holding the letter and looking at each other.

Imagine, for a moment, how incredible it must have felt, to be him, her, to be them, beautiful and young and envied, what it must have been like to be the Rams, and the city of Cleveland, on top of the world. Nothing could be better . . . and yet, it wasn't enough. Rams owner Dan Reeves saw the rise of something—and wanted to monetize it. The team had lost money since he purchased it in 1941. By 1945, with the All-America Football Conference planning to put a team in Cleveland, Reeves had his sights on relocating to Los Angeles or Dallas. Other NFL team owners were wary of expanding west due to travel costs. Reeves convinced his skeptical and budget-strapped fellow owners to allow the move the classic way: by throwing a rich man's fit. He left an owners' meeting in a hissy, stomped to the bathroom, and threatened to sell the Rams if they blocked his move. In January 1946, less than a month after the Rams' championship victory, they relocated to Los Angeles, becoming the first major professional sports team located west of the Mississippi and breaking the seal for baseball's Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants to follow twelve years later. Clevelanders, angry at losing their team—though little did they know, it would not be the last time—blamed not only Reeves and the NFL, but her. "If Dan Reeves wanted Robert Waterfield," one columnist wrote, "and he did, he'd have to please his wife, Jane Russell, and bring the team to Los Angeles."

Jane read those words and thought, As if!

# # #

No single decision did more for quarterback, and professional football, from billboards to dark film rooms, than the Rams' move to Los Angeles. Waterfield was a handsome idol returning home with a championship to a movie star wife, in the golden age of Hollywood. In Cleveland, a void needed to be filled. An Ohio coach named Paul Brown moved into the market with his All-America Football Conference franchise, first named the Panthers, then when confronted with a patent issue, changed to the favorite in fan polls, which happened to be his own name: the Browns. He liked challenging norms, a rare independent thinker in a profession full of glorified gym teachers. Brown was the first coach to try to control every facet of the game—first to believe that the game could be controlled. His writings of what he wanted from the game's most important position were prescient: "an artist throwing the ball; a particular kind of guy; a quick thinker; a finesse man." He found him in Otto Graham, a star out of Northwestern. In 1946, Graham produced a 112.1 passer rating, a record that stood until Joe Montana broke it in 1989, and he won the first of four straight AAFC championships. The team was absorbed by the NFL, and Brown and Graham—or Graham and Brown, depending on where you lean—reached ten straight title games and won seven championships, the league's first dynasty, a legacy eclipsed only by the legacy of all dynasties: of fighting over legacy.

Like Walter Camp did at the turn of the century, Brown both elevated the quarterback position and chipped away at it, trying to keep it in its place. Graham once said that he'd "rather risk losing games by, say, 35–28 and have the fans on their feet with excitement" than win 3–0. Brown was the opposite. He emasculated Graham, first by stripping play-calling from him, then by questioning his toughness. During one game, Graham felt the pass rush and fled the pocket; Brown had ordered him to stay in it, no matter what. Brown benched him, which wasn't enough: He told an assistant coach, knowing that Graham was within an earshot, "Now at least we have a quarterback playing who has the guts to stay in the pocket."

"If I had a gun," Graham later said, "I'd shoot him."

Instead, Graham walked away in 1955, after another championship. A fight for credit ensued. The two central questions that would dominate all NFL dynasties, from the Steelers to the 49ers to the New England Patriots, were unleashed at the same moment: Coach or quarterback? System or player? What makes for genuine creativity and success? Is the relationship between two people with the same goal collaborative or combative? Does a coach possess the power to make a quarterback? Way, way, way, way down the ballot, could many of those who failed, including me, have done a little more with the right playbook? To be truly great, a team needs both, but only one is essential, which coaches tend to learn the hard way. Brown replaced Graham with a man named Milt Plum. He produced a stellar passer rating of 110.4. The Browns reached the playoffs in 1957 and 1958. They went several years, and several passers, before another title.

Brown blamed the quarterback. Of course.

# # #

An image was coming into focus out west, of glamour and won-der and beauty. Here was RussField exiting a black limo at the Ambassador Hotel, in a gown and tux, photographers clamoring for a shot. Bob liked most of Jane's Hollywood friends, and in the later years especially enjoyed Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe. Bob and Joe liked to talk sports, often analyzing statistics deep into the night. "Birds of a feather," Jane said to Marilyn. "The most egotistical people in the world." But there was also an undeniable appeal. Bob, in her words, "was sexy, dynamic, opinionated, extremely bright, witty, and as stubborn as they come. You either find that kind of man irresistible and exciting or you don't understand him and can't tolerate him for a moment."

Jane wrote about a dark side of Robert's personality in her 1985 autobiography, My Path and My Detours, describing herself as a battered woman. The struggle to cope with pain and pressure too often meant anger, drinking, and violence between them. As Jane told it, she and Robert were in Vegas at a comedy show. As the drinks went down, mutual irritation rose. At one point at the table, Jane ran a fork down the side of Robert's face, leaving red lines, humiliating him. When they returned to their hotel room, Jane approached and apologized, but something in Robert snapped: He slapped her face. She slapped back. Her face swelled up—like a "purple cantaloupe," she later said. Photographers noticed it the next day, behind her huge sunglasses. Her management team cooked up a story about her getting hit by a car door in a windstorm.

"I'm so sorry I could die," Robert said later, according to Jane. "I'll never hit you again as long as I live."

They both swore off drinking—Jane lasted three years; it's unclear how long he did—but eventually started up again. It was too much a part of their public lives and too critical a painkiller in private.

# # #

Waterfield was named All-Pro again in the Rams' first year in LA, leading the league with 17 touchdown passes. He played a fictionalized version of himself in the 1948 football movie Triple Threat. Two years after the move to LA, on October 4, 1948, the Rams fell behind the eventual champion Philadelphia Eagles 28–0 in the third quarter. Waterfield was reduced to that familiar challenge of any quarterback: The opponent knows you must throw, and you've got to figure out how to do it. Waterfield passed: 27 yards to Jack Zilly on a corner route for a touchdown, then a short bullet on a tight end crosser at the goal line for a three-yard score, then a hand-off for six, then Zilly again on a fly for 20 yards. The game ended in a 28–28 tie. The Los Angeles Examiner wrote that Waterfield "led the Rams with the surety of Churchill, and the quiet dignity of Ed Murrow."

In December of 1951, Waterfield, the Rams' other quarterback, Norn Van Brocklin, and Otto Graham—three future Hall of Famers—met in the NFL Championship Game, the Rams against the Browns. Twelve years after an NFL game was first shown on television in a period of fear of war and triumph in war, the championship game itself was broadcast across the country for the first time. The first images viewers saw were the introductions of the coaches and quarterbacks for each side, generals and lieutenants, twin pillars of the franchises. Almost 60,000 people showed up at the Coliseum. Tied at 17 in the fourth quarter, Van Brocklin hit receiver Tom Fears for a game-deciding 73-yard touchdown. After the win, Rams players celebrated in a huge huddle at midfield. Waterfield stood outside the group, distancing himself and feeling distanced. He was almost thirty-one years old. A doctor diagnosed him with a duodenal ulcer, and told Russell that what made Robert a great quarterback—that he took victories and failures so personally—might seriously erode his health if he didn't walk away. He added that Waterfield's need for friction and tension, the desire for a winner and a loser in all facets of life—essential elements of a quarterback—was making him miserable. Waterfield stayed on for one more year, starred in his first major film role, Jungle Manhunt, and on December 1, 1952, he retired. A newspaper ran a cartoon of him, touting his accomplishments and statistics and his changing of the calculus of what was possible, being tackled from behind by a familiar old man: "Pop Time."

From "American Kings: A Biography of the Quarterback" by Seth Wickersham. Copyright © 2025. Reprinted with permission of Hyperion Avenue (distributed by Random House). All Rights Reserved.

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