Will Jeanie Buss, daughter of Lakers owner Jerry Buss, be the next to rule her father's sports kingdom, or will one of her brothers rise to power? Inside a fractured family fable.

You all remember King Lear, Shakespeare's play about a

dysfunctional 12th-century family. Lear was a capricious

autocrat who alternately indulged and badgered his children. The

kids endured the old man's shenanigans until Lear, addled by the

prospect of his own mortality, carved up his kingdom and

parceled it out to them.

Then all hell broke loose.

ACT I

Jerry Buss fancies himself a kind of benevolent King Leer. He

has snapshots of almost all the women he has ever dated, and he

stores them--the photos, not the women--in bound volumes in the

library of his Los Angeles estate. "It's quite a collection," he

says. "I'm up to album eight."

Women are just one of the collectibles in this extravagant

sensualist's life, competing for interest with rare coins, rare

stamps and rare comic books. Most important of all is his cache

of L.A. sports franchises. At the moment it consists of two

basketball teams, the NBA's Lakers and the WNBA's Sparks, but in

the past it has included franchises in ice hockey (the Kings),

roller hockey (the Blades), TeamTennis (the Strings) and indoor

soccer (the Lazers). To house these acquisitions, Buss bought

his own arena, the Great Western Forum.

While building his sporting kingdom, Buss sired a large family.

Before he embraced the Playboy philosophy in the mid-1960s, he

and his wife, JoAnn, had four children: Johnny, Jimmy, Jeanie

and Janie. After Jerry divorced JoAnn, in 1972, he had two more

kids--Joey, now 14, and Jesse, 10--with one of his girlfriends,

Karen Demel. Recently he has become a father figure to Demel's

24-year-old son Sean, who just changed his last name to Buss. No

word on whether he plans to change his first name to Juan.

Though Jerry is still sovereign, at 65 he may feel that time's

winged messenger is drawing near. Over the last few years he has

assigned more responsibility to his four oldest kids. "I want to

prepare them for the day they take over the operation," he says.

"I feel better having family members involved."

He has installed Johnny, a testy onetime race-car driver, as

president of the Sparks; Jimmy, a happy-go-lucky onetime horse

trainer, as assistant general manager of the Lakers; Jeanie, an

ebullient marketing whiz and onetime Playboy pinup, as president

of the Forum; and Janie, an earthy housewife and onetime

psychology major, as an executive in the Lakers' community

relations office. Even sweet-natured Sean, an employee in the

Lakers' season-ticket office who wears three hoops in his left

ear and two in his right, appears destined for big things. "Dad

is trying to get the L.A. franchise in Ted Turner's new summer

football league," Sean reports. "If he does, I'll be working

under the general manager. Down the road, if the opportunity of

being the G.M. were to arise, I hope Dad would consider me."

For now Dad envisions a triumvirate, with Jeanie in charge of

the Forum and the Lakers' business side, Jimmy in charge of

Lakers player personnel and Johnny in charge of the Sparks.

"There's room for each one of them," Jerry says.

He may be alone in that opinion. Though Johnny's team is one of

Jeanie's Forum tenants, the two siblings have barely spoken

since 1995 and don't acknowledge each other's presence in the

halls of the building. Johnny's relationship with Jimmy is

similarly strained: Their last conversation was more than a year

ago. And while Jimmy and Jeanie talk, they're not close.

"It's crazy," says one of Jerry's longtime business associates.

"Johnny dithers and broods. Jimmy is easily distracted and has

no instinct for the jugular. Jeanie is the most capable one, yet

she's overlooked by her loving dad. Does Jerry honestly think

this arrangement will work? I'm willing to bet--no, I

guarantee--that within three years he sells the entire operation

to Rupert Murdoch."

Jerry scoffs at this. "I like basketball too much," he says.

Still, his problem is not just that he has to give the kingdom

away someday but that he has to hang on to it long enough to

give it away. "He's one of the last of a dying breed," says NBA

commissioner David Stern. "In big-time sports the day of

individual owners like Jerry is fading fast. He's sort of

wealthy, but he's not extraordinarily wealthy like some of our

owners. Given the size and risk of the asset, we are moving

toward [an owner who is] a combination of the Forbes 400 and the

FORTUNE 500."

The payroll for the Lakers, the engine that drives the Buss

empire, is $40 million. The team salary cap is $37 million. "I

would like to increase the cap," Jerry says, "but if you project

out to what the players seem to be demanding, it would go up to

at least $70 million, which is ludicrous."

While Buss isn't carrying any debt, he isn't particularly

liquid. The combined value of the Lakers, the Sparks and the

Forum is estimated at $300 million, but says Buss, "just about

everything we make is pumped back into the business." However,

when the Lakers forsake the Forum and move into the new $300

million Staples Center in downtown L.A. toward the end of 1999,

Buss is supposed to get a windfall of $50 million to $60 million

from the sale of 25% of the team to Fox and the owners of the

Kings. That should keep him in pocket change for a while.

Buss was just your average self-made real estate mogul with a

Ph.D. in chemistry when he bought the Lakers in 1979. He quickly

made the team over to fit his profligate tastes. He brought in

the Laker Girls and live bands. He came up with the concept of

courtside seats filled with movie stars and other celebrities.

He spent mightily to put the show in Showtime by signing Magic

Johnson, James Worthy and, more recently, Shaquille O'Neal and

Kobe Bryant. The payoff has been five NBA titles in 19 seasons

(but none since 1988) and more than $100 million in annual

revenue. "What amazes me is that my father is always thinking 10

steps ahead of everyone else," says Janie. "Every deal he makes

is always to his advantage. He's just too smart."

Stabbing Marlboros into the corner of his mouth and hauling a

slight paunch, Buss cuts an imposing if not exactly regal figure.

His is more of a cowboy image: shabby jeans, rugged boots and the

slightly ragged look of a ranch hand in a spaghetti Western. But

don't be fooled; Buss is one of those public figures whose

presence is always slightly more important than the event he's

attending. "I live life energetically," he says. "I go out every

night, and I'm either dancing or playing poker or watching a

game."

During the NBA season he holds court in a private box high above

the visitors' bench, the better to see plays unfold. Afterward

he can often be seen in the media lounge with the latest

addition to his calendar collection (Miss March, Miss April) on

his knee. "Just one out of a hundred says, 'Would you buy me a

fur coat or something?'" Buss says of his dates. "I usually

hear, 'Can you get Kobe Bryant's autograph?' I like people, I

really do. It's one reason I gave up chemistry. I was too lonely

in the laboratory."

Buss was lonely long before that. His dad, Lydus, was an

accountant who apparently loved numbers more than people. He

left his wife and only child in the Wyoming mining town of

Kemmerer during the Depression and ended up teaching statistics

at Berkeley. Jerry's mother, Jessie, barely made a living as a

waitress. "I was an infant when my father went west," says Jerry

evenly. "I saw him maybe two or three more times before he died

[in 1952, when Jerry was 19]. He was the studious type, into

Chinese dialects and ancient scrolls." Mathematics, Lydus

thought, was the purest creation of the human mind.

Young Jerry loved numbers, too--far more than he loved his

stepfather, a plumber named Stub Brown. Jerry was 12 when his

mother remarried, making him the oldest of four kids in a

decidedly unblended family. "My father was not accepted by his

stepfather," reports Jeanie. "He was a Buss living with the

Browns. He felt like an outsider. It made him a very

compassionate person."

All Jerry's kids describe him as a generous father, even if he

spreads himself too thin. "Though he really doesn't have time for

us, he always has time for us," says Sean. "He understands what

it's like not to have a dad around."

So do Johnny, Jimmy and Jeanie. Though their parents divorced

without nuclear warfare, the emotional fallout was devastating

for the children. "It left us confused about who our father

was," says Johnny, who was 12 at the time of the breakup. "We

knew Dad only as the guy who came over on weekends and took us

to McDonald's. I could never understand why he'd want to go to

Las Vegas with the Playmate of the Year rather than take us to

Disneyland. Even though he provided for us wonderfully, we were

starved for the love of a father."

ACT II

Johnny may never have recovered from the pain of his parents'

divorce, but he tries to hide his feelings behind a pensive

bearing. Like a military governor occupying an obscure province

in the country of Basketball, he issues fiats from his father's

bordello-red Forum war room. It has a worn leather sofa, a

massive, uncluttered oak desk and, on the credenza behind

Johnny, five gleaming NBA championship trophies.

It's a late afternoon in late July, and the fiat of the day

concerns Julie Rousseau, coach of the Sparks. "I just fired

her," says Johnny. "We've still got 10 games to play, yet we're

out of playoff contention. I offered Julie suggestions, but she

didn't follow them. Which confused me." A year ago, 11 games

into the Sparks' maiden season, Johnny became the first WNBA

owner to fire a coach (Linda Sharp). Now, 20 games into the

second campaign, he has become the first to fire two coaches.

Which puts him in the slightly embarrassing position of having

three head coaches on the payroll.

Johnny sits erect in his father's armchair, gazing at his Batman

watch. He is a mild, melancholy man of 42, prone to long

silences and dark anxieties. Johnny is Hamlet, a prince of

indecision, to his father's Lear. Small things plunge him into

despair. At Janie's 1992 wedding reception, he was undone by a

fellow guest. "Johnny got into an argument, stormed out of the

party and spent the entire evening sulking in the back of the

bus my dad had chartered," says Janie. "That's the way my

brother has been his whole life."

That may or may not have anything to do with the Sparks' failure

to ignite. The team has yet to have a winning season, and though

L.A. is the WNBA's second-biggest market, the Sparks' average

attendance this season was the second lowest in the 10-team

league: 7,653 fans. That was 1,300 fewer than the Sparks

attracted last year, some 3,000 fewer than the league average

and less than half the attendance averaged by the Washington

Mystics, an expansion club that won three games all season.

What's more, Johnny's general manager, Rhonda Windham, is a

fellow USC alum whose main qualification for the job was seven

years in the Lakers' public relations department. Windham signed

Sharp, her college coach, to a three-year deal and then--with

Johnny's approval--replaced her with Rousseau, who had coached

only in high school. "I hired [Sharp] because she knows so much

about basketball," says Johnny. "She just needs to hone her

skills and develop more knowledge." What kind of knowledge?

"About how to coach in the pros. We'd certainly like to see her

back." Coaching in L.A.? "Well...not this team."

Johnny sounds no less confused explaining his reluctance to

promote the team to L.A. lesbians, an obvious fan base: "I know

the lesbian community is showing up, so I leave them alone. I'd

rather focus on pulling in more males. Would it hurt if most of

our spectators were lesbian? That's hard to say. Right now, 67

percent of our fans are women, 8 percent are men and 25 percent

are kids. I doubt that every woman who comes to our games is a

lesbian. If, say, half were, then to have a lesbian majority,

more than half the kids would have to be, too."

Johnny doesn't have a natural affinity for the business. He was

just born to it. "Originally, I wanted to be president of the

United States," he says. "But I wasn't much of a student, so

that option was out." He wasn't much of an athlete either. He

quit the Pacific Palisades High football team two plays into the

first day of tryouts. He got kicked off the gymnastics squad for

not cutting his hair, and he was kicked out of school for

cutting class. Johnny finished up at another high school and

enrolled at Santa Monica College, where his record was equally

spotty. He signed up for courses; he just didn't attend them.

In 1976, at age 19, Johnny became the boy toy of Australian

tennis player Dianne Fromholtz, then No. 2 on the women's tour.

He carried her gear and chauffeured her around for two years,

until she wrote him a Dear Johnny note. Unhappy in love, he

enrolled in the USC drama department. Unhappy in college, he

went to work for Dad. He was managing a real estate company in

Las Vegas when Jerry called him back to L.A. in 1982 to run the

fledgling Lazers of the Major Indoor Soccer League. But after

three seasons in which he felt he was being regarded as an

unnecessary evil by Forum executives--who in turn felt that

Johnny simply didn't understand that the Lazers did not deserve

the same treatment as the Lakers--he quit. "I had wanted to be

part of a team and make something of my life," he says. "I was

part of one, and failed."

Johnny, then 28, fell into a depression that lasted several

years. He developed asthma. He stayed in bed for days at a time,

surrounded by his comic books, Disneyland posters and talking

Pee-wee Herman doll. "I didn't think I had a chemical

imbalance," he says. "It had more to do with the frustrations of

being the son of a famous man and being unable to find myself on

my own."

To pass the time, he played the horses and began racing Formula

Three cars. "Racing gave me a sense of self-confidence," Johnny

says. That sense was shattered after two years, when Jerry

refused to bankroll his next step in the sport.

"Dad wouldn't buy Johnny the million-dollar race car he wanted,"

Janie says. "In Johnny's mind Dad was throwing up another

roadblock so he wouldn't succeed."

Jerry says he acted out of paternal protectiveness. "I had been

encouraging him," he says, "but when he started racing at faster

speeds, I looked at him like, You're my son. I don't want you to

do this."

So Johnny didn't. For the next eight years he cruised aimlessly,

a thirtysomething child of privilege trapped by his privileges.

"Growing up, we had everything we ever wanted," says Janie, the

psych major. "So what's the incentive to accomplish anything?"

Johnny wrote two unproduced screenplays and sang in an

uncelebrated country and western band, and one Friday night in

1990 he suddenly married his girlfriend. "On Saturday night," he

says, "she read me a list of the monthly expenses she needed to

maintain her lifestyle." Four thousand dollars' worth of

expenses, according to Johnny's tally, not to mention upkeep on

her new Ferrari, a gift from her wealthy ex-husband. On Sunday

morning they separated; on Monday morning Johnny called a

lawyer. A year later they were divorced.

In 1992 Johnny married L.A. Clipper Girl Christy Curtis.

According to Johnny, his father joked, "Are you sure no Laker

Girls were available?"

When the WNBA was created in 1996, Jerry passed over the obvious

choice for Sparks president--Jeanie, who had made herself

available for the job--in favor of Johnny. "I think he picked me

because he thought the league was going to be just a quiet

little summer thing," Johnny says. Of course, Johnny was

ambivalent: "I thought, Oh, my god, another minor league. I

can't be involved with another failure. I've failed at

everything I've done."

As if by self-fulfilling prophecy, the Sparks are widely

regarded as the WNBA's most ineptly run franchise. Johnny says

he keeps trying to make things happen promotionally but Jeanie

keeps standing in the way. She balked at his demands for more

dramatic lighting, for fireworks displays and for pregame

carnivals in the parking lot, though she ultimately agreed to

scaled-down versions of the last two. "All she thinks about is

liability," he grumbles. "All I think about is the success of my

team. I may fail this time, but it's going to be on my terms and

not because my sister is uncooperative. The Sparks are in my

blood, in the air I breathe. I feel I've been handed the Olympic

torch, and it's my responsibility to keep it lit. If the team

fails, I don't know what the consequences for me will be."

ACT III

Jimmy Buss, 38, has a practical, politically savvy side that his

brother lacks. He's a guy whose guile and drive prove the fallacy

of the system of primogeniture.

Jimmy is all for his father's Team Buss approach--to a point. "A

great checks-and-balances system," he calls it. "I wouldn't mind

Jeanie having control over Lakers finances as long as I had

ultimate say over player personnel." He presses his hands

together and makes a tiny cathedral with his fingers. "Working

with my brother would be a different story, though. I don't know

that I'd want to." His feelings toward Johnny fall somewhere

between pity and contempt. "For him to base his life on the

Sparks is ridiculous," Jimmy says. "That's exactly what he did

with the Lazers. You felt he would blow up any second and quit."

Though Jimmy's life has been tinged with tragedy, contentment

radiates from him as if from a lighthouse. He's a slightly beefy

guy with a round, ruddy face that crinkles easily into a smile.

"Jimmy always seemed bigger and faster than me," says Johnny. "He

was the cute kid with blue eyes, the athlete, the one girls fell

over."

A party animal with lots of friends, Jimmy got by on charm and

good looks. Curiously, he shares Jerry's keen interest in

numbers. "When I was little, my father would give me a bag of

M&Ms if I memorized the serial numbers on a dollar bill," he

says. Jimmy was no natural-born capitalist, though. As a boy he

was bent more on spending money than on acquiring it.

Before dropping out of USC, Jimmy majored in math and minored in

business, or at least invested in minor businesses--video

arcades, a bakery--with borrowed money. He and his best friend,

Bill Goldenberg, spent many evenings at the Forum studying the

Kings, in which Jerry Buss had a stake until he sold it 10 years

ago. In 1981 Jerry promised the players a postseason trip to

Hawaii if they amassed 100 points. They finished with 99, but

Jerry took them anyway. Jimmy and Bill went, too, and spent the

first day tooling around Oahu on mopeds. On one curvy stretch,

Jimmy pulled ahead and waited for Bill to catch up. Bill didn't

show, so Jimmy circled back and found him sprawled on the side

of the highway. A truck had fishtailed and killed him. Jimmy was

devastated. "It was left to me to call Bill's parents," he says.

"I was looking for sympathy from them, and all they did was

blame me for taking him to Hawaii."

Jimmy's saga gets worse. Brokenhearted over Goldenberg's death,

he met a girl and, in 1983, married her. He wanted a child; she

couldn't have one. So, going through an agency, they adopted a

boy from Florida, whom Jimmy named Jager, after another rolling

stone. Within months, however, the parents decided to separate.

They pretended to continue living together to mollify the social

worker who monitored the adoption. This charade lasted six months.

After obtaining a divorce in late 1985, Jimmy hired a nanny, won

sole custody of Jager as a single parent and began leading a

double life: playing house with two girlfriends in L.A. In early

'87 Jimmy learned that one of the two women had been decapitated

as she disembarked from a helicopter. "It was the first time in

a long time that I'd opened up my heart to anyone," Jimmy says,

sighing, "and she was taken away from me."

To heal his aching heart, he married his other girlfriend. They

separated more than a year ago. Since then Jimmy and Jager have

bounced among his father's various Southern California

bungalows. Last year Jimmy pulled Jager out of seventh grade to

home-school him. "They had mutually decided it would be good for

Jager," says Jeanie with obvious displeasure. "I don't know how

many 12-year-olds should be part of that decision-making

process." Or, in this case, 37-year-olds. "Jimmy stayed at it

for maybe a week before losing interest," says Jeanie. Jimmy

insists he stuck with it for a year and it was "a wonderful

experience." Jager is now back in school.

When Johnny quit the Lazers in 1985, Jimmy replaced him and,

unlike his brother, accepted the job's limitations. "Early on, I

learned not to question certain procedures," he says. He leaned

on the Lakers for support services and brought annual losses down

from $1 million to $500,000. "It was a hopeless exercise,

though," he says. "The league had no TV contract, and our salary

cap was twice what we were taking in." The team folded in 1989.

About eight years ago Jimmy decided to try his hand at training

horses. He had misspent much of his youth at the track, and

though he was 6'2", he had attended jockey school when he was

20. His father owned a half-dozen thoroughbreds, and he handed

Jimmy the reins. "He picks things up very fast," says Bob

Baffert, trainer of Kentucky Derby winner Real Quiet, "and he

isn't afraid to ask questions." Although Jimmy had some success

with his father's horses, track insiders questioned his

dedication, saying he showed up at the track mostly when he felt

like it. "At least he wasn't a bad trainer," says Baffert.

In 1997, shortly after Jerry divested himself of the last of his

increasingly unprofitable horse racing stock, he asked Jimmy to

join the Lakers as a sort of Jerry West in waiting. (On Sept. 4,

West, 60, signed on for another four years as Lakers executive

vice president.) There is some intrafamily skepticism about this

move. "Jeez!" says Janie. "Jerry West is like a god. It's hard

to think of him and Jimmy in the same sentence."

Not for Jimmy. "I always wanted to be a G.M.," he says. He

thinks sizing up a player is no different from assessing a

stallion. "With a colt, you watch his stride and how he pops to

extension," he says. "I just have to learn the qualities to look

for in humans."

Jimmy's tutor, West, may be the shrewdest judge of talent in the

NBA, and Jimmy has tagged along with him and general manager

Mitch Kupchak on several scouting trips. "I've gotten a ton of

knowledge from him," Jimmy says of West. "For instance, that

watching how a player acts on the bench is as important as how

he acts on the floor. [West] looks at what a player does when he

comes out of a game and how he interacts with his coach. He'll

walk up to a prospect and say, 'How ya doin'? I've got word that

you beat up a woman.' And I'm sitting there thinking, Wow! Is

this legal?" Yet Jimmy thinks scouting is vastly overrated.

"Evaluating basketball talent is not too difficult," he says.

"If you grabbed 10 fans out of a bar and asked them to rate

prospects, their opinions would be pretty much identical to

those of the pro scouts."

That comment mystifies West. "I have great admiration for what

our scouts do," he says. "If the job is so easy, then why do some

teams always have more success than others?"

Jimmy doesn't take West's rejoinder personally. "I don't mind

criticism so long as I'm comfortable with what I'm doing," he

says. "No matter what I accomplish, I'm going to be ridiculed

until I win five championship trophies."

Jimmy's long-range plan is really a short-range plan. "Right now

my dad is Number 1 in the Lakers organization, and I'm Number

4," he says. "After another year of this apprenticeship, I'd

feel comfortable going from 4 to 1. But you'd have to worry

about the comfort level of the current 2 and 3." He need not

worry about 2. West plans to leave when Jerry Buss does. Ever

the diplomat, West says of the post-Jerry Lakers: "Power is one

of the things that scares you because of the way it's used. If

it's used correctly, no one will even sense it."

ACT IV

In a slinky blue cocktail dress, Jeanie Buss promenades to her

table at a smart Beverly Hills restaurant. A male diner turns

his head and stops eating, fork suspended midway to his mouth.

Jeanie blushes. And yet three years ago she posed for Playboy.

No dreamer or eager innocent, Jeanie is a realist, a sensible,

funny woman who knows what's what. She's a man's kind of woman,

with money in the bank, a passion for slasher films and a

profound appreciation of all sports. "Of all my kids," says

Jerry, "Jeanie's the one who turned out most like me." By which

he means she's the one with the business smarts, the one who

actually graduated from USC--with honors, no less.

"Jeanie has a complete knowledge of the interplay of sports

marketing, building management and TV," says David Stern. "If

she took over the Lakers from her father, I don't think anything

would be lost in the transition."

Jeanie has spent many of her 37 years quietly preparing for just

that. At 14 she would tag along with her father to World

TeamTennis board meetings. The league went under in 1978 but

resurfaced in 1981 as TeamTennis. Jerry once again owned the

Strings, and he named 19-year-old Jeanie their general manager.

"Basically, my dad bought me the team," says Jeanie. "It was a

very empowering experience." But not a particularly profitable

one. The Strings sputtered along before dissolving in 1993.

"I always felt the TeamTennis thing was hopeless," says John

McEnroe, who dated Jeanie for six months in the mid-'90s. "She's

been tossed lame sports by her father and yet made something of

each of them."

When the Strings went belly-up, Jeanie was also running another

dog-cart club, the L.A. Blades in the Roller Hockey

International league. "Jeanie's knowledge is second to none in

getting a second-tier sport off the ground," says Ken Yaffe, the

NHL's liaison to RHI. "Though the executive meetings were

male-dominated, Jeanie was very strong-willed and never caved

in." She was an outspoken opponent of propping up ailing

franchises, and though other owners overruled her on that issue,

it cost them dearly. RHI collapsed last year.

The Forum, Jeanie says, is more her home than any house she's

lived in. "My 21st birthday was there, I was robbed at gunpoint

there, I met my ex-husband there," she says. Jeanie and Steve

Timmons, the flat-topped, flame-haired U.S. Olympic volleyball

hero, met during a 1986 tournament she was promoting. "I saw

Steve as somebody who was very marketable," she says. "What I'd

thought was love was really my attraction to his magnetism."

By 1990 Timmons's magnetic field had started to lose its pull.

Or perhaps Jeanie had begun to feel a certain power of her own.

In any case, they found themselves yanked in opposite

directions. She wanted kids; he didn't. "I was always, 'Steve,

whatever you want, whatever you want,'" she says. "But whenever

I wanted something, he was always, 'You're compromising what I

want.' I probably should have been his manager instead of his

wife."

Jeanie's pal Magic Johnson laughs when he thinks about her

getting hitched. "She goes out with a million men, finally says

'I do' and how long does it last?" he asks. "A month or two?"

"Three years," says Jeanie. "Which is a lot longer than Magic's

TV show."

While she never lost her sense of humor, she says she did lose

her self-esteem. As a rite of empowerment, she asked herself, Is

there anything I've always wanted to do but haven't? Her answer:

appear nude in Playboy.

"Very strange," says McEnroe. "It must have had something to do

with her unique relationship with her father."

He may be right. Jerry had once owned the Playboy Club in

Phoenix, and according to Johnny, Jeanie had always been

insecure about her looks. So she grabbed the phone and pitched

her assets to the magazine's editors. A six-page spread in the

May 1995 issue bares those assets in a Forum locker room, in the

Forum loge and--paging Dr. Freud!--on her father's Forum desk.

Jerry claims it's the only Playboy he's never looked at. "But I

hear Jeanie looked absolutely stunning," he says.

Jeanie took her parents' divorce hard. She was seven when they

broke up, and she felt emotionally abandoned. In fourth grade a

kid on the playground said, "I never see your dad. Where is he?"

Not sure how to answer, Jeanie said, "He's dead."

At 17 she moved in with her father. The house they shared was

Pickfair, the 42-room Beverly Hills estate once owned by

silent-screen royalty Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks.

Jeanie treasured the house and became such an expert on it that

she led guided tours. Strapped for cash, Jerry sold the place in

1987 to Hollywood mogul Meshulam Riklis and his wife, Pia

Zadora, who promptly gutted it.

For Jeanie the razing of Pickfair resonates in the Lakers' and

the Kings' imminent vacating of the Forum. To stay competitive

with the nonunion Pond in Anaheim, she has engineered a landmark

deal with her union stagehands at the Forum. To fill seats, she

hopes to lure a minor league hockey team. The Sparks will stay

put, so Jeanie and Johnny will remain estranged bedfellows.

Still, trouble thunders in the distance, for them and for Jerry.

How will Jerry contend with the Murdochs and the Disneys, who

swallow small-time owners whole? How can he compete against

corporate octopi with tentacles in TV and movies and other parts

of the world beyond sports?

Today at the Beverly Hills restaurant, Jeanie's most immediate

concern is a tempest called Johnny. "Every success I have makes

it harder for him," she says, cupping her face in her hands.

Tears trickle through her fingers. "I feel his pain--we all have

pain--but it won't go away unless he does something about it."

She thinks her father's Three Bussketeers idea is wishful

thinking. "I can see us all having a role in the business," she

says, "but Dad needs to designate one of us the leader." If that

one were Johnny, Jeanie would resign. "I wouldn't be crushed,"

she says. "I'm pretty marketable, and I know I could find a good

job."

ACT V

Eighty miles east of the Forum, in the horse country of

California's Lake Elsinore Valley, Janie Buss Drexel presides

over a two-acre farm she calls Skunk Flats. She shares the

spread with her husband, their two toddlers and scores of

orphaned animals: stray dogs and cats, broken-down horses and

ponies. Standing on her front porch, she points out a toothless,

nearly sightless foundered pony named Pumpkin. "Most people

would put him to sleep or send him to the junkyard like an old

car," she says. "I just want to take care of him."

Janie is the 35-year-old Buss baby. "I consider myself the best

adjusted of my siblings," she says. "Jeanie was always trying to

please my dad, entering beauty pageants, getting good grades. Me?

I couldn't have cared less. All I wanted was to ride my horse.

Maybe that's where all the animals fit in. They filled the

emptiness."

She has been on the Forum's staff since 1987. Before signing on,

Janie went to seven colleges and had four majors, finally

getting a psychology degree from Cal State-Dominguez Hills. "I

didn't do a thing with the degree," she says. "Does anybody?" In

the last 11 years she has worked as everything from secretary to

her current position as an executive in the community relations

office, which allows her to work out of her home. "I have zero

interest in managing the business," she says. "I associate that

with my father's always being away from home."

Her duties include answering as many as 300 requests a

week--from charities, fund-raisers, even terminally ill

children. A couple of months back Janie got a letter from a

nurse in Oklahoma asking if Shaq would phone a cancer patient on

his eighth birthday. "The nurse made it sound as if the boy was

about to die any second," Janie says. She takes a deep breath.

"It's emotionally draining. If it were my own child who was

dying, I'd do anything I could. So I do the best I can."

How often do things work out? "I'm usually afraid to ask," she

says.

From her redoubt at Skunk Flats, Janie watches the Shakespearean

spectacle of her father's succession unfold. "My brothers would

love to run my father's operation," she says, "but I don't think

they could. John is too angry and fragile. He's got the

first-born syndrome: If people don't play the game his way, he

takes the ball away, sits by himself and cries. I feel so sorry

for him, but I can't feel real sorry for him."

Janie finds her Prince Hal of a second brother as unworthy of

the throne as her Prince of Denmark of a first brother. "Jimmy

doesn't have the backbone to negotiate or the confidence to

succeed," Janie says. "He defers to his friends, and once you

start delegating power, you lose control. Both my brothers are

fearful of getting what they want and fearful of failure. If

you're not ready to accept failure, you can never face it."

Which leaves Jeanie, the fair Cordelia of this fractured family

fable. "Only Jeanie has the brains and the desire," Janie says.

"She's a great negotiator and a great numbers cruncher, and she

knows how to say no. At some level, Johnny and Jimmy must

understand that."

Janie believes her father's "master plan" may be to sit back and

watch the three children jockey for position. "Like I say, my

dad is always 10 steps ahead," she says. "I think he's testing

us to see if we can get along. He's getting us used to the fact

that he won't be around forever, and he's watching each of us to

figure out who should do what.

"Well, I guess it's better now than 10 years from now. But

realistically, I don't see how it could ever work."