Taylor 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.