Goldengirl

He wasn’t likely to forget that Armitage himself had joined the list from John Gardiner’s prestigious Camelback ranch in Arizona. Back in 1975, Ken Rosewall was the professional there. One baking afternoon that August, Dryden had taken a call which resulted in a helicopter flight over the mountains. To his eye, Armitage had looked no different from the dozen other willowy youngsters hammering shots at each other across the nets. Assured the boy would make it when he had grown some shoulders, he had taken him on. That first season in 1976, Armitage wasn’t even among the national seedings. It had been difficult to squeeze $1,000 from the Dunlop people for using their racket. Now they were glad to pay $200,000.

So once again he was off prospecting. And because he had struck gold with Armitage it didn’t mean he was shouting Eureka this time. He would agree to add the boy to his list provided he didn’t hold up banks or do something sponsors wouldn’t care for, but he had been in the business long enough to know how many talented teenagers discover tennis isn’t the whole of their lives.

Still, he didn’t pass up a chance like this. Not in tennis. It was the number-one growth sport, bigger even than golf. In 1970, ten million Americans had played the game; in 1979, close to forty million. The industry was grossing in the region of two billion dollars. Sponsors were paying in excess of $50,000 a minute for commercial spots in nationally networked tournament matches. With that amount of money changing hands, agents were zeroing in on anyone who could hold a service game.

Whatever the outcome of the present trip, it would be interesting to look over the ranch his enterprise had helped build. For Cambria was financed before Armitage had clinched the 1979 championship at Forest Hills. Each endorsement, every consultancy fee, was won in the teeth of competition from Sports Headliners, International Management, and the others big enough to have a second line of clients. Dryden Merchandising had done well for Dick Armitage. From descriptions, the ranch relegated to the status of an ancient monument the wooden clubhouse reeking of rubber shoes and egg-and-cress sandwiches where Dryden had once enrolled for Saturday afternoon one-setters in England. The brochure Armitage had sent him when Cambria opened spoke of luxury casas, with four bedrooms, casitas, with two massage rooms, saunas, a gourmet restaurant, swimming pool, and, almost superfluously, ten grass courts and five hard.

It sounded like an ideal place to take a girl. The conspicuous gap in Dryden’s itinerary was the one beside him in the passenger seat. Thirty-two, with features that projected virility even from the pages of Business Week, with reddish-brown hair and a mustache more brown than red, he generally had no trouble arranging company for weekends. Apart from his southern English diphthongs, which he had tried to moderate until he found they worked better than alcohol in advancing a relationship, his principal asset was the deceiving blueness of his eyes, so pale that they seemed incapable of distinguishing anything so sordid as the main chance. He dressed to fortify the illusion, in discreetly patterned shirts and gray lightweight suits.

But this time there was the empty seat. After receiving the invitation, he had looked at his schedule for the rest of the week and rapidly telescoped three days into one and a half, but left no time for making social arrangements. He was happy to leave his personal secretary to make the adjustments on his calendar, arrange a service for his car, order a pair of new shirts — but not a female companion. Not even in California. He flicked a wistful eye over the talent making for the beach at Malibu.

No chance. He wasn’t going to hazard his reputation by arriving with a pickup. He silenced the CBS news and lit a Winston. Christ, if he couldn’t survive one weekend without a woman...

His former headmaster in England, a man more gifted in sarcasm than educating boys, had neatly encapsulated his school career in the words ‘Dryden Found Wanting’ on his final report card. Within two years of that, he had a diploma in marketing, a controlling interest in three pop groups, and any girl he liked in Oxford. At twenty, he was negotiating film contracts from an office in Jermyn Street. Before the merchandising boom happened, he opened his agency, and cornered the London market. As the pace quickened in the seventies, he got a foothold in New York, and then shrewdly moved the center of his business to Los Angeles, where the biggest American agencies only had subsidiaries. By 1977, the Dryden machine was humming in Paris, Rome and Tokyo. As backups, he had eleven companies dedicated to managing, promoting and insuring the sixty-three celebrities in his clientele. They included superstars of TV, cinema, fashion and music as well as sports. Now, in 1980, he had a pre-tax turnover exceeding $200,000,000.