By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN
Published: January 19, 2008
Georgia Frontiere, the owner of the National Football League's Rams
for nearly three decades and the first woman to take control of a
league franchise, died Friday. She was 80.
The Rams' owner, Georgia Frontiere, with the Lombardi Trophy amid
confetti after St. Louis won the Super Bowl in 2000.
Her death was announced by the Rams on their Web site. She had been
hospitalized with breast cancer for several months, her children
said in a statement posted there.
Frontiere, an occasional night-club singer and chorus line performer
who hoped to become an opera star, was thrust into the pro football
world in April 1979 when her husband, Carroll Rosenbloom, the owner
of the Los Angeles Rams, drowned in the ocean while swimming near
his Florida home.
Rosenbloom had groomed his son from a previous marriage, Steve, as
his successor, but he left 70 percent of the Rams' ownership to his
wife, evidently to minimize estate taxes. She quickly asserted
control, firing Steve Rosenbloom and replacing him as the team's top
executive with Don Klosterman, the general manager.
She bristled at what she apparently perceived to be snickering from
the news media and the football world at a woman running an N.F.L.
team.
"There are some who feel there are two different kinds of people —
human beings and women," she said at her first news conference.
The Rams went to the 1980 Super Bowl, losing to the Pittsburgh
Steelers, and Frontiere was in the spotlight, appearing on the cover
of Sports Illustrated kicking a football and with Rams players in an
American Express commercial, "Do You Know Me?"
But she soon turned over most of the financial and football
decisions to team executives.
In July 1980, she married her seventh husband, Dominic Frontiere, an
award-winning composer. Then came troubling times. Her husband was
indicted in 1986 on tax charges relating to his involvement in the
scalping of more than 2,500 tickets to the 1980 Super Bowl. Georgia
Frontiere said she had given the tickets to her husband to be given
away, and she was not charged in the scheme. She divorced Frontiere
in 1988, a year after he was released from prison.
Georgia Frontiere put her stamp on the Rams' franchise when she
moved the team to St. Louis in 1995, obtaining a lucrative deal for
a domed stadium.
"St. Louis is my hometown, and I brought my team here to start a new
dynasty," The St. Petersburg Times quoted her as saying about moving
the Rams, who had been in Southern California for nearly a half
century. "In my early days, I thought I'd become a big opera star in
Europe. Now, by bringing the city an N.F.L. team, I'm doing
something that truly will make St. Louis proud."
The Rams won the Super Bowl in 2000, defeating the Tennessee Titans,
and appeared in the 2002 Super Bowl, losing to the New England
Patriots.
Frontiere became a high-profile figure in St. Louis; she made
extensive charitable donations and was a patron of the arts.
But she had a reputation as something of an eccentric, at least by
the standards of N.F.L. club owners. She was often on the sideline
during games and planted kisses on players who had turned in an
outstanding effort. When Cabbage Patch dolls first came on the
market and proved hard to get, she bought one for each of her
players. She pursued astrology and drew up charts for some of the
Rams' stars.
Frontiere, as a youngster, appeared with her mother, Lucia Pamela
Irwin, a blues performer, and her brother, Ken, in a singing group,
the Pamela Trio, performing at state fairs and ballrooms. In the
late 1950s, she was a talk-show host in Miami and she made
appearances as part of NBC's "Today" show cast when Dave Garroway
was the host.
She met Carroll Rosenbloom, then the owner of the Baltimore Colts,
in 1957 at a dinner given by Joseph P. Kennedy at his Palm Beach,
Fla., estate. They were married in 1966, shortly after Rosenbloom
was divorced from his wife, Velma. At the time, Georgia and Carroll
had had two children together.
Carroll Rosenbloom became the owner of the Los Angeles Rams in 1972,
in a franchise swap, and Georgia became a part of the Hollywood
social scene as a hostess in their Bel Air mansion.
But in recent years, she gave few interviews and had faded from the
public eye.
She is survived by a son, Dale; a daughter, Lucia Rodriguez, from
her marriage to Carroll Rosenbloom; six grandchildren; and her
companion, Earle Weatherwax.
At her death, Frontiere, the Rams' chairman, owned 60 percent of the
team. The remaining interest is controlled by Stan Kroenke, the vice
chairman.
As a woman in the N.F.L., Frontiere expressed a determination to
succeed. On the eve of the Rams' appearance in the 1980 Super Bowl,
she told USA Today: "From the time my late husband died, it has been
a constant effort to do what he expected me to be able to do. He
said: `If anybody can, you can. You always stick to your ideas. And
nobody pushes you around.' "
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