EmailPrintOpen Extended ReactionsTAYLOR SWIFT AND TRAVIS KELCE aren't yet a phenomenon in March 2023, when I roll up to a ranch in northwest Montana hoping to learn about almost everything that has happened to the country since the early 1940s. They aren't even a couple yet. But the idea of them exists here, in a two-level brown home that sits at the top of the development line of the Sapphire Mountains and is cased with racks of antlers and stacked logs.A weathered floor mat greets me: THE WATERFIELDS.Buck and Etta Waterfield invite me in. They met through Buck's parents: Bob Waterfield and Jane Russell. Bob played for the Rams in the 1940s and '50s, when quarterbacks weren't just athletes and heroes, occupying a status reserved for generals and politicians, but were starting to become sex symbols, too. Jane was one of America's most famous pinup actresses then, a goddess and a life force, a legend by the time she was 19 years old. They were one word in the public imagination in their prime and their production company, one of America's first "power couples," known simply as RussField.Now in his 60s, Buck Waterfield leads me through the living room to a hallway downstairs. The walls are lined with posters of Jane's movies and photographs of Bob's great games. "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" starred Russell and Marilyn Monroe. Headlines in the Cleveland Plain Dealer herald Waterfield's MVP and NFL championship from 1945, his rookie year. Jane's most famous photograph, from "The Outlaw," lying in hay with her blouse draped off her shoulder, sultry and dangerous, is on one wall. A picture of the Waterfield family surrounding Bob and his bust at his Hall of Fame induction in 1965 is nearby.Perhaps no one in the modern pantheon of sports-entertainment couples -- not Josh and Hailee, nor Tom and Giselle; not A-Rod and J-Lo or Becks and Posh; not Randall and Whitney and Russ and Ciara; not even Taylor and Travis -- matched Bob and Jane in the days when Los Angeles was becoming Los Angeles as we know it today. They were at the center of three emerging American forces: Hollywood, football and celebrity. Gossip columnists wrote about them when Bob was a star at UCLA in 1942 and Jane was a young model and actress. The earliest iterations of paparazzi followed them around, hungry for their smiles and their secrets -- but always asked permission before snapping a photo. RussField partied with people such as Frank Sinatra and Clark Gable and Judy Garland and Bob Hope and Mickey Rooney and John Wayne -- and Monroe and Joe DiMaggio. But it was their wedding that shaped the times they lived in and previewed so much of what was to come.It was April 1943. The heart of World War II. 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. Word started to leak about 10 days before the ceremony: ACTRESS TO BE BRIDE, read the papers, all of which are in Buck and Ella's scrapbooks, stacked high and kept in their basement.Bob and Jane met at Van Nuys High School, two kids with designs on going places. He was a senior, she was a freshman, and he asked her on a date in the hallway. They dated on and off for years before he proposed, two people ready to hunt for titles and rings and billboards and accolades, two people not yet ready for the life that would be too much and not ever quite enough. They considered a wedding in L.A., but a day before Easter, they decided to bolt to Vegas. "Couldn't have been less romantic," Jane later said. They rolled up at Rancho Vegas, a casino on the strip. "Let's get it over with first so we can enjoy dinner," Bob told her. They spotted a chapel called Gretna Green, which was later renamed Graceland after Elvis and Priscilla visited it.Later that night, they lay in bed. Jane's mind was racing. She seemed to sense that theirs wasn't just a marriage. It was a public entity; they had combined something with chemical implications, with the potential to explode or to fizzle, but most of all, capture attention. Soon there were headlines -- BOB WATERFIELD MARRIES BEAUTIFUL JANE RUSSELL -- and RussField became a figment of the imagination of millions, something in the firmament. And soon, they wondered: Could they each survive it? Could the two of them together survive it? That night, Jane didn't know that LIFE magazine, among others, would visit them in Cleveland in 1945 and profile them as America's couple. She didn't know that Rams owner Dan Reeves would move the team to Los Angeles in the weeks after winning the 1945 NFL championship, the first major professional team west of the Mississippi, looking in part to maximize and monetize the RussField starpower. She didn't know that some back in Cleveland would blame her, and that the Rams would be replaced by Paul Brown's Browns, a pair of transactions that changed the idea of a quarterback and revolutionized professional football. Jane didn't yet know that they would host parties in their new Sherman Oaks home overlooking the Valley, and that those parties would become a kind of seat of the culture, a gathering place for the who's-who of modern American life. She didn't know that she'd start to drink too much, either, and that he'd drink too much, too. She couldn't yet picture the cruelty each of them would be capable of, especially when it came to each other. "They liked to turn the knife, get a reaction, and then step back and watch it unfold," Buck Waterfield told me for my book, "American Kings: A Biography of the Quarterback." His mother didn't know that a celebrity marriage can be so intense that it leaves each spouse with nowhere to go.But in tears that night, she seemed to sense all of it. "Robert, if you ever meet anyone really important to you, have an affair if you must, but please let's don't ever break our vows over something unimportant," she said."Oh, shut up," he snapped back.Six months after I visited Buck Waterfield, the Kansas City Chiefs beat the Chicago Bears 41-10 in Missouri, and the first viral picture of Taylor and Travis hit the internet. They were leaving the locker room, he in his classic matching shirt and pants suit, looking somehow like a man and a boy all at once, and she in a white tank top and shorts, never out of style, with a Chiefs sweatshirt around her waist, coming off less like a global superstar and more like a young woman falling in love. On the surface, the two of them as a couple -- as an idea -- might not yet have made sense. Kelce was kind of goofy and, football feats aside, best known for howling a Beastie Boy line after winning Super Bowls. Swift was from another world and another strata, an icon who tended to date in the misfit world of singers and actors. But both were in their 30s. Both had become all-time greats in their own fields. Both had made a lot of money. Both knew what they liked, and what they didn't. After Travis explained on his podcast that he had tried and failed to slip her his number -- have to respect shooting his shot -- they struck up a conversation. That led to rumors of romance, which led to cameras seeking confirmation, which led to this scene after the Bears game. Travis noticed the photographers first, flashing a quick glare as if to say, "Don't screw this up for me, guys."What do you want when you seek the highest heights of America popular? Is it fame? Adoration? A quieting of some secret doubt inside you? And what do you find once you've achieved it? Is it the way you'd pictured it, the way you'd hoped? How does a relationship square with the lonely, sometimes ruthless requirements of greatness? When you go through the world at the center of every room you enter, what does that do to you, and how does that mix with the principles of mutual sacrifice at the heart of a marriage? How do the three of you -- each spouse and the peering public -- handle scrutiny, stress and expectation that your life is supposedly the envy of the world, and that you, more than anyone, supposedly have it together?"It was too much," Buck Waterfield told me.Even, maybe especially, in the domestic gallery in tribute to his parents, to RussField, you can feel how the biggest marriages are also small. Made up of two people, icons or not, stars or otherwise. In the end, the photos that matter most aren't of accomplishments or records or moments of glory, perhaps. In the end, the photos that matter most are of husbands and wives, fathers and mothers and kids. In the headlines and headshots at Buck's home you wonder what it took for Bob and Jane to find it within themselves to withstand the pressures of fame, to fight through them, to get back up when they knocked them down.If RussField was one of the country's first real examples of an idea, of a couple as an idea; it was also one of the country's most powerful examples of what it cost. Football and Hollywood always move on to the next star. Photographers and columnists seek out other superstars and power couples. The machine rolls on. For RussField, the struggle to cope with the pain and pressure of attention and later the pain and pressure of no longer being in the spotlight often meant anger and alcohol. They each strayed. They split and reunited again and again. And by the late-1960s, they couldn't help but ask themselves what they had built and what they had left. And did they have it because of or in spite of each other?The answer came in divorce court in 1968. But decades later, after Bob Waterfield had died, Jane Russell lived in Arizona. One day she was talking to Etta, her assistant who ended up marrying Buck."God, why couldn't we have just stuck it out?" Jane wondered."Sometimes it was just part of the job," she said. "You spend so much time apart."Maybe if she hadn't been an actress, and he hadn't been a quarterback, life would have been different.But of course, if she hadn't been an actress, and he hadn't been a quarterback ...
