The Main Course : Studio City Club a Star Attraction for Those With Taste for Golf

Ten a.m. any day of the week. Nearly all 24 driving-range stalls at the par-3 Studio City Golf and Tennis Club are filled with men in pastel polyester or women getting golf tips from men in pastel polyester. At a nearby yellow table in the shade, a women’s foursome sips freshly brewed coffee and exchanges wild tales about reaching the green in two. They automatically flinch every time a range ball clangs off a sideboard and ricochets who knows where.

Occasionally, a Hollywood celebrity like Bob Hope or Clint Eastwood stops by to hit a bucket or tackle the 1,010-yard, nine-hole course or make Hollywood small talk. The privately owned public club has been a hangout for stars ever since it was built by an actor for his studio cronies in 1955. Hope used to sit on a red Naugahyde couch in the knotty-pine clubhouse and watch “Monday Night Football” on an ancient black-and-white television. Jack Nicholson has been known to show up without money, identify himself behind his patented dark sunglasses and ask the cashier, “Am I good for it tomorrow?”

It was in the coffee shop, officially named the Cuckoo’s Nest, that comedian Foster Brooks developed his shtick as a sloppy fall-down drunk. Carol Banderlin, who has run the shop for the past 28 years, recalls seeing unsuspecting women shriek after Brooks staggers over to them and explains how he is just about to drive a busload of children to Disneyland. Brooks entertained the customers so well that one of them got him his first paid gig.

In a small office off the main room, where a sign warns golfers that the new color TV “is only for watching sports,” George McCallister Sr., 77-year-old former pro golfer, can be found most days attending to his new golf video or sorting through stacks of old photos. George and an Air Force general. George and a golfing great. “Do you know who that guy on my right is?” he asked, showing a small color shot of two men at a beach. “It’s Zeppo Marx. We were in Mexico together.”

Thirty years ago this December, McCallister and his best friend, Art Anderson, bought out actor Joe Kirkwood Jr., who played Joe Palooka in the movies, and began turning Studio City into a club whose reputation now stretches far beyond the studios. It is nationally known for being the place where a major redesign of the club head was made. Golfers from all over Los Angeles, not just the Valley, know about Studio City’s driving range. In tennis, it was one of the first private clubs in California--maybe the first--to think of charging the public to reserve courts for an hour at a time.

When McCallister and Anderson bought the club, only about 250 foursomes used the course every week. Today, the number is up beyond 500, about a quarter of them senior citizens. But despite its growth, Studio City has retained it clubby feel. “It’s like a semi-private country club,” said Mike Tomich, who has been playing there for 21 years. “The course is kept in good shape, there’s a lot of camaraderie.” Regulars and employees go back for years. “The only people who don’t come around here anymore have died,” Banderlin said. And not because of her famous hot cakes, which are said to go down as easily as a three-inch putt.

While McCallister and Anderson remain the heart and soul of Studio City, John McCallister has become the brains. The youngest of George McCallister’s five sons, John, 35, has been hanging around the club since he was 3. “I’ve known him from the time he had to stand on his tiptoes to order cherry Cokes at the Dutch window,” Banderlin said. Manager of the club since 1978, John single-handedly has drawn national attention to Studio City. Two years ago, Arnold Palmer began marketing a set of McCallister’s “Axiom” clubs with radically redesigned club heads. More than 40,000 sets, priced at $440, have been sold, and McCallister has a share of the action.

McCallister spent $10,000 of his own money developing the club, which has grooves on the head and a wide base to help golfers swing correctly. In his oven at his Westlake home five years ago, he fashioned a clay model of a design that had been rattling around in his brain for years. McCallister has no engineering degree, but “if they gave a Ph. D. for golf, I’d have one,” he said. “My mind has been exposed to an awful lot of golf over the years.”

In 1985, U.S. Patent No. 4,550,914 was granted to McCallister for “a golf club head with visual swing-directing cues.” To get a utility patent, McCallister said, “I’d had to prove to the patent office that the design actually improved the swing.” Once he filed for a patent and had a prototype built, McCallister, like thousands of other inventors, needed a backer. Enter Palmer. In a Seattle hotel room in 1984, Palmer took one look at the club and thought it was good enough to bear the signature of golf’s most legendary name.

Ever the tinkerer, McCallister is currently working on a new design for a putter “that will be as revolutionary in putting as the Axiom” is in hitting, he said. The putter, which he expects to bring out sometime next year, “will be the first putter to actually encourage you to make a better stroke.”

When McCallister met with Palmer in Seattle, it wasn’t as if they were complete strangers. Palmer was a family friend (he even bought his collie Thunder from George McCallister), and John remembers first meeting him when he was 12. Palmer was especially close to Art Anderson. They were childhood friends in Pennsylvania, and later they played practice rounds together, “bumming around on the road in the ‘60s and early ‘70s,” said Anderson, 57, an industrial real-estate developer.

Anderson and George McCallister met in 1946 when both were members of Wilshire Country Club. McCallister, an insurance executive recently moved to L. A., had just regained his amateur standing after a year on the Professional Golfers’ Assn. tour. Anderson was 18, a scratch golfer. Despite their 20-year age difference, they hit it off, and “we’ve never had a disagreement,” George bragged. One of the ventures they agreed on was buying the Studio City club. McCallister, through his golf contacts, had heard that it was for sale, and owning their own golf club had been a lifetime dream.

“You can’t get anything better than this,” McCallister said, reminiscing. On the first night they owned the club, McCallister stayed up writing a list of improvements on a yellow legal pad. The place already had a first-class golf course: Kirkwood had patterned each green after the best he’d played on all over the world. He also had erected nine 30-foot tees, each topped with 3-foot-wide lighted golf balls that have become a Whitsett Avenue landmark.

Over the years, McCallister and Anderson have put in an irrigation and sprinkler system and planted fir and citrus trees, hundreds of rose bushes and 20,000 palm trees (only about 10% survive, towering above the course). “I belong to Bel-Air,” Anderson said, “and this is prettier.”

It was Anderson who saw the potential in building tennis courts. In the early ‘70s, tennis was beginning to boom and public courts were becoming overcrowded. When Anderson’s son, Karl, couldn’t get a court at Balboa Park, Anderson built one in his Encino backyard. Then a neighbor jokingly suggested that Anderson rent the court to him when it wasn’t being used.

“My wife said, ‘Why don’t you take out that par 4 ninth hole and put a few courts on the course,’ ” Anderson said. In 1973, renting courts was a revolutionary idea--public courts were free. “Everybody said we were nuts,” Anderson remembered. Regardless, Anderson and McCallister decided to build five courts, making room by rearranging the eighth and ninth holes into two par 3s. It didn’t take long to realize that they had tapped a vein--even while construction was still under way, all the prime time had been reserved. Today, more than 7,000 people have a reservation fee on deposit and the 20 courts are always booked in prime time.

While tennis provided a much-needed infusion of cash, golf remained the club’s focus. But in the ‘50s and ‘60s, golf was not as mainstream a sport as it is now. To get people on the course, George McCallister, once a teaching pro at Winged Foot in Mamaroneck, N. Y., began giving lessons to anybody who could hold a club. He gave lessons at Valley high schools. He held clinics at the club for Valley physical education teachers. In 1958, he published an animated lesson book with hundreds of photos of himself--if you flip the pages front to back, it appears that George is actually moving.

“But what really made our business here,” he said, “was the price of our lessons. In those days, other clubs were charging $5 an hour. We charged 50 cents.”

And McCallister began teaching women. “The ladies wanted a class on Monday mornings,” he said. “The first class, 25 showed up. The next week, 40. Now this is going to sound like bull, but the third week, I pull into the parking lot and it’s full. We had 110 women there, a couple from as far away as El Monte. We had to break them up into three groups.”

John McCallister has not only continued his father’s teaching tradition but improved on it. Every week, between 80 and 100 people--now paying the inflationary rate of $55 for five classes--are given a slick instructional manual titled the “JM Concept,” which is based on John’s theories and observations. For instance, the grip is deemphasized and a student doesn’t even hit balls until the third lesson. McCallister stresses visualization of the perfect swing and sends his students home to practice on a cardboard floor mat called a “swing patterner.”

Like an assembly line, the golf school creates new golfers who return often to play the course (greens fees: $3.50 weekdays, $4 weekends) and also practice their game by hitting $4.50 buckets of what McCallister calls “the best range balls in town.” The driving range is a big draw--some 15,000 red-striped balls are rattled about daily inside the 210-yard-long cage. Along with Rancho Park on Olympic Boulevard, it is the closest range for a lot of Westside golfers, including residents of Beverly Hills.

Although Studio City may feel like a private club, it plays like a public one. Golfers come in various stages of efficiency. Holes-in-one are made weekly. Once, George’s son Wesley sank two in one week. The course record is a five-under-par 22, held by a few golfers, including George. But the hackers outnumber the whackers. On the right side of the range, an 80-foot-high fence had to be constructed to protect the health of people on the adjacent first fairway and ninth green. “We made sure to use chain-link, not netting, in that right corner,” McCallister pointed out.

Pablo Santos, who operates the motorized ball retriever in the range, is encased by a steel cage as he rolls over the landscape, but other employees don’t enjoy the same protection. Banderlin’s coffee shop is behind the line of fire. She thought she would be safe there, but one day a ball came shooting through an open window and put dents in the kitchen. Nobody at the range was responsible. The ball was hit by a duffer on the ninth fairway who had been attempting a short chip to the green and wound up only a mere 100 yards off target.

When Joe Kirkwood opened the course in ‘55, Whitsett was lined with single-family homes and empty lots. Today, apartments and condos dominate the street. Over the years, real-estate developers have drooled over the prospect of turning the club’s 17 acres--now worth an estimated $50 million--into high-density housing complexes. “People try to buy us out all the time,” John McCallister said. But Kirkwood had signed a 50-year lease with the owners of the property, the Weddingtons, a prominent Valley family. Not only does the lease prohibit development, but the city of Los Angeles further guaranteed the preservation of the area by designating it as a green belt.

“But even if we could, we wouldn’t turn the course into condos,” McCallister said. “We’re just not into that. Golf is our business.”