Jamie Luskin grew up playing hardball in Baltimore — shortstop material, she recalls. An ardent Orioles fan, she was 10 when she told her parents she would own a baseball team someday.
Frank McCourt, growing up in the Boston suburbs, loved the Red Sox and knew owning a team could be more than a fantasy. His grandfather had a stake in the long-gone Boston Braves.
Years later, these two met at Georgetown University, fell in love, married and eventually went to Boston, where they made their fortune in real estate.
In 2004, they realized their dream of owning a major league ballclub. They quit Boston for Los Angeles and transformed themselves into a glamour couple, hosting celebrities in the owner's box at Dodger Stadium.
They bought a house on the beach in Malibu. Then they bought the one next door.
Behind closed doors, they were often a noisy power couple — stubborn and contentious, arguing over whatever they felt strongly about, whether it was ticket prices or putting players' names on jerseys. (He had the names taken off at one point; she wanted them back on.) But in public, cameras captured them perpetually grinning at each other, as if sharing some delicious joke.
"Fun and feisty," one friend called them. If they came at a problem from different angles, so much the better. They had a yin-and-yang, you-see-the-forest-I-see-the-trees symbiosis.
Today, they live apart — she in Malibu, he at the Montage Hotel in Beverly Hills — and they no longer argue face-to-face. High-priced lawyers do it for them, and though the spectacle might be noisy and feisty, few would call it fun.
*
They went on their first date as freshmen at Georgetown, and the differences in their personalities soon became apparent. She was punctual. He was habitually late. When he would arrange to meet her at the library, she'd use the waiting time to study.
Jamie's father was a master of promotion. Jack Luskin boasted in commercials that he was "the cheapest guy in town," and he had Luskin's electronics stores in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C.
Frank was the son of a construction company owner and knew all about nuts and bolts and infrastructure. When they were college students, he would walk her through the D.C. Metro system, then under construction, and explain how it was all put together.
"I like to learn and that was all new to me," Jamie, 56, said in an interview.
