The Battle for Beverly Hills

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  To Ed

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Writing a nonfiction book is like taking a journey: you know the ultimate destination, but you have no idea who you will encounter or the adventures you’ll have along the way. At least that is the way it was for me.

  In writing this book I stand on the shoulders of giants. Everyone to whom I reached out for help or advice was beyond generous with their time and gracious in the giving of it.

  My long list of people who must be thanked begins with my friend and colleague Annie Jacobsen. When I was having my moment of doubt and pain in getting this project under way, she met with me and gave me a metaphorical hit upside my head. “Of course you can do this,” she said. And, as everyone who knows Annie is aware, she is always right.

  Next are two people whose contributions have enriched this story beyond measure: Robert S. Anderson, great-grandson and grandson, respectively, of Margaret and Stanley Anderson, the original owners of the Beverly Hills Hotel, author of Beverly Hills: The First Hundred Years, who has forgotten more about Beverly Hills than most people will ever know; and Cari Beauchamp, the Mary Pickford Foundation’s Resident Scholar and author of Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood. Their respective insights into the City of Beverly Hills and Mary Pickford, the woman who drove the fight against its annexation to Los Angeles, were both illuminating and invaluable.

  Authors who had written on similar subjects were instrumental as guides, saving me from going astray: John Buntin, Joel Engel, Tracey Goessel, Michael Gross, William J. Mann, Richard Rayner, and Marc Wanamaker. A special thanks to the late Kevin Starr, with whom I corresponded when the project was in its infancy and whose absence will be felt by anyone writing anything about the history of California.

  Librarians are a critical resource for anyone with the temerity to write a book. I am in debt to the research desk at the History and Genealogy Department of Los Angeles Central Library and, first, to Gail Stein, and then Alice Kuo, Susan Minobe, and the staff of researchers at the Historical Collection of the Beverly Hills Public Library.

  Members of law enforcement were invaluable as well. Many thanks to Clark Fogg, senior forensic specialist at the Beverly Hills Police Department, and Michael A. Fratantoni, archivist at the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

  No writer is an island. A huge debt of gratitude is owed to those who kept me going. My daughter, Logan Clare, who also happens to be my attorney, gets a double dose of thanks (and love); her husband, Mike Weiss, also a writer, for listening—and not nodding off—when I talked about the book; Scott Waxman of Waxman Leavell, who forwarded my pitch to agent extraordinaire Rachel Vogel, now with Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Literary Agency, who would first guide me through the proposal process and then find Battle for Beverly Hills a home at St. Martin’s Press; the editorial team at SMP, especially Emily Angell and Elizabeth Lacks, the two stunning-in-every-way editors who made this a better book, and George Witte and Sara Thwaite, who guided it through completion; Mimi Park, who navigated me through my finances; Phil Savenick and the Beverly Hills Historical Society, whose photo collection is a true window into Beverly Hills’ past; and last, but certainly not least, my husband, Ed Clare, who has given me, well, everything.

  Introduction

  In the two months following the proposed annexation of Beverly Hills to Los Angeles in early 1923, the sometimes heated rhetoric between those against joining the bigger city—which included some of the world’s most famous faces from the new medium of the moving pictures, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Tom Mix, Harold Lloyd, Rudolph Valentino, Will Rogers, Conrad Nagel, and Fred Niblo—and those in favor had been a war of words. That is, until the morning of February 26, 1923, when an “Infernal Machine,” as the bomb was called in the newspapers, exploded in the hands of Al Murphy, the editor of the Beverly Hills News, the city’s weekly paper. Mr. Murphy and the publication, which he owned as well as edited, were pro-annexation, as were many of the local real estate developers, including many of the principals of the Rodeo Land & Water Company, which had created Beverly Hills at the turn of the twentieth century.

  If there was one thing that could capture the immediate attention of the residents of Los Angeles it was a bomb. In L.A., especially since the 1910 bombing of the Los Angeles Times, explosive devices at newspapers caught everyone’s attention. The attack was covered extensively in the local papers and the story was picked up by publications across the country, bringing attention to what had been a mundane political interaction between two cities at the western edge of the United States. The battle for Beverly Hills had turned ugly.

  It’s reasonable to assume that most of the people in the Los Angeles area who followed the news of the bombing—and some of it, especially from William Randolph Hearst’s Los Angeles Examiner, was breathless—must have been asking themselves: Why on earth would the suggestion of joining the City of Los Angeles spark such violent outrage? Beverly Hills was remote and geographically tiny with a population of less than a thousand; it had only been incorporated as a city for nine years. Several communities across the Southern California basin—unincorporated areas as well as incorporated cities—had voted to join Los Angeles, especially after the completion of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, the wonder of engineering completed in 1913 by William Mulholland that brought water from the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada Mountains through the Owens Valley. What made Beverly Hills so different? And what unique set of circumstances led to its ability to resist the lure of Los Angeles and its abundant water?

  Well, for one thing, Beverly Hills was the city that Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks called home. In the wake of the undisputed king and queen of motion pictures moving to the small city on the western edge of Los Angeles, many other famous faces—Charlie Chaplin, Tom Mix, and Will Rogers among them—had followed. The stars had their reasons for wanting to live in Beverly Hills, some of which were obvious, like the smaller police force separate from the Los Angeles Police Department, an important distinction in the era of Prohibition. But it wasn’t all about seclusion and the privacy to drink cocktails and throw the occasional orgy (although that was part of it); there were also subtler reasons such as property values and community control.

  The stars’ work against annexation may all seem like a bit of a lark now. And in retrospect, these eight silent screen stars, who struck poses and emoted for the hand-cranked cameras, come off as quaint. They were anything but. They were the first generation of movie stars, and the world had not known anything like them before. They wielded power not because they had been born to it or earned the money to buy it. Their power came from the connection their audience developed with them while sitting in the darkened auditoriums watching “flickers.” In fact, the timing for the battle of Beverly Hills was prophetic. When the Beverly Hills Eight, led by Mary Pickford, fought
annexation, they were doing something that had never been done before. What they did was so successful that it became a model for generations of celebrities to intervene in political causes that caught their fancy or in which they had a vested interest. And over the decades people paid attention. It is now so much a part of the American political landscape that it’s startling to realize that one hundred years ago, before the emergence of “movie stars,” this cause-and-candidate promotion by celebrities did not exist. And whether or not they realized the long-term consequences of using their high profiles to influence an election’s outcome, it dawned on the celebrities who fought the battle for Beverly Hills against the land developers and realtors that there was a shift in how they were perceived and the influence they could bring. And they were going to capitalize on it.

  * * *

  How and why did their campaign work? The changing times were a factor. The Roaring Twenties was an era of unprecedented turmoil, both cultural and political. On the one hand, women had finally been given the right to vote; on the other, the Volstead Act, prohibiting the consumption of alcoholic beverages, had passed. Immigrants were pouring into the country; the inexorable population shift from rural to urban that had started before the turn of the twentieth century was accelerating. As the robber barons who had capitalized on the country’s growing economy after the Civil War began to lose their iron hold on commerce, and a new generation of business tycoons emerged, the stifling propriety that had gripped social conventions also began to give way.

  In the two decades leading up to the Roaring Twenties, political upheaval had raged across the globe. The old order had been wrenched, often by extremely violent means, so as to be unrecognizable. The War to End All Wars, as World War One was called, had changed the face of Europe. On Europe’s eastern edge, the Russian Revolution had sent shock waves through every democratic government in the world; on the western side of Europe, the Republic of Ireland had emerged from the bombs, bullets, and blood of the Irish Revolution, splitting the island and thwarting the English who had controlled the whole of Ireland for almost a thousand years. For the United States, World War One had thrown it, especially the soldiers who had traveled to Europe, into the world. There was no going back.

  The profound technological disruptions of the first two decades of the twentieth century were certainly part of the equation. Telegraphy was giving way to telephony. Radio was beginning to bring news, sports, and music into homes. Gramophones were changing how the world experienced music. But it was perhaps the new motion picture industry, which had chosen Southern California as its center of operation, that had the most profound cultural impact. Motion pictures had done nothing less than change the very nature of entertainment, something that makes humans human, something that before film had always had to occur live and in real time. When the new medium was getting started in and around New York City in the earliest days of the twentieth century, no one could have predicted that the uncredited actors and actresses who appeared in the flickers would rise to such prominence and influence so quickly; that an entire industry of fan magazines would spring up and that the general population would be in thrall to the men and women whose images were projected on screens across the country. The nation simply could not get enough of these shiny new stars, and their adulation fueled a new industry.

  And it was, after all, California. As much as the new residents pouring into the state might strive to remold California into replicas of the places they left behind in the East, Midwest, and South, it had always been different. For one thing, California had actually been part of Mexico in living memory, albeit those remembering would have been quite old. Reminders of the state’s Spanish and Mexican past were everywhere, including the sweeping land grants that had been awarded to the Californios, as the citizens of the Spanish and Mexican colony had been called. Beverly Hills had been one such land grant, and its borders today are almost exactly those of Rancho Rodeo de las Aguas, or the Ranch of the Gathering of the Waters, awarded to the Valdez family for its support during Mexico’s war of independence from Spain. The widow of the soldier to whom Rancho Rodeo de las Aguas had been granted sold the property only after defending her home in a daylong battle against Native Americans. It’s not too great a flight of fancy to say that a fighting spirit was part and parcel of Beverly Hills.

  Although they couldn’t know it at the time, the celebrities who took a stand against annexation not only won that battle, they quite possibly changed politics in the United States—and perhaps the world—forever. In their fight against annexation by the City of Los Angeles, and probably without realizing it, they laid the groundwork for celebrity influence that is still a work in progress. In the decades that followed, actors would capitalize on the instant recognition their fame provided to champion causes and win elections to offices at all levels of government. For the most part, their fame enabled actors and celebrities to skip to the head of the line and run for higher office without working their way up the political ladder, making the necessary connections, learning the political ropes and campaigning as they moved from local to regional to state and, ultimately, national office. Among the elected offices that have been held by those who made the leap from stage and screen are city council member (Sheila Kuehl), mayor (Clint Eastwood, Jerry Springer), congressperson (Helen Gahagan Douglas, Sonny Bono), senator (George Murphy, Al Franken), governor (Ronald Reagan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jesse Ventura), and president (Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump).

  Oddly, in a city as self-absorbed with its own legend as it is, Beverly Hills’ close brush with oblivion isn’t an oft-told tale. Most residents have no idea that if it wasn’t for Mary Pickford and the rest of the Beverly Hills Eight—Douglas Fairbanks, Harold Lloyd, Tom Mix, Fred Niblo, Conrad Nagel, Will Rogers, and Rudolph Valentino—at the very most their city would be a named neighborhood in Los Angeles like Hancock Park or Bel Air, instead of its own municipality. However, the spirit that drove Beverly Hills to turn down a marriage with Los Angeles is still very much alive. Beverly Hills is its own city and one to be reckoned with. It has its own laws, police force, fire department, school district, trash collection, and parks and recreation department. There are no hospitals or cemeteries in Beverly Hills, population density is low when compared with the surrounding city of Los Angeles, and high-rise buildings are almost nonexistent. Up until very recently none of the region’s Metropolitan Transit Authority’s stabs at mass transit—such as the subway or light rail lines—have made it inside the city’s borders, although its bus routes do bisect the city. (The expansion of the MTA’s “Purple Line” is slated to have two stops in Beverly Hills.) And there are no freeways running through the city. In an urban region that is sutured together by freeways, there isn’t one that will take you into or out of Beverly Hills. When the freeways were being built to tie the far-flung cities in every corner of the greater Los Angeles area together, Beverly Hills said “no thanks.” As a separate city, that was its right. The population of Los Angeles, about 3.9 million, might dwarf Beverly Hills’ 34,700 or so residents, but in civic matters the smaller city isn’t afraid to go toe to toe with its large neighbor. Beverly Hills is an independent city in every meaning of the word.

  The only nod to the stars’ contribution to an independent Beverly Hills is Celluloid, a peculiar twenty-plus-foot-tall bronze-and-marble obelisk by sculptor Merrell Gage, whose plinth features a bas-relief representation of each of the eight stars in one of their signature roles. Extending up from the squat base is a tall, narrow lance-like object around which a spool of film is unfurling. The memorial is located on a traffic island roughly the shape of a triangle at the obtusely angled intersection of Olympic Boulevard and South Beverly Drive, or South Bev as it’s known, a busy intersection in one of the most, by some accounts the most, traffic-intensive urban area in the United States. Since the monument’s installation in 1959, undoubtedly millions have driven by. Far from being the hoped-for tourist attraction, because of its inaccessibility very few p
edestrians have ventured across the busy lanes of traffic to discover the remarkable event this monument commemorates. It’s just there. If you’re looking at it, that means you are stopped at a light or stuck in traffic. It will be in the rearview mirror before long, or so drivers hope.

  Saving Beverly Hills from annexation may be what the monument on Olympic Boulevard commemorates, but it is far from the only thing the campaign accomplished. Today, listening to a celebrity advocating a cause, endorsing a candidate, or even declaring his or her candidacy for office doesn’t raise an eyebrow. In 1923, when eight stars battled to keep their city free from the clutches of what they perceived as a rapacious Los Angeles, it was something new. This is the story of how the stars and the city aligned to make this come to pass.

  1

  Rancho Rodeo de las Aguas and the Invention of Beverly Hills

  The Beverly Hills where Douglas Fairbanks bought his first house in 1919—a hunting lodge that lacked water and electricity where he could have his secret assignations with Mary Pickford—was not too far removed from the days when the area was the Rancho Rodeo de las Aguas. Although the land Beverly Hills occupies had been part of the vast stretch of western North America claimed by Spain in the early sixteenth century, it wasn’t until 1769 that an official exploration party, led by Gaspar de Portola on behalf of the king of Spain, traveled there. It’s with the Rancho Rodeo de las Aguas land grant, awarded to Vicente Valdez for his service to Mexico in its war of independence against Spain, that the history of Beverly Hills really begins.

  Present-day Californians tend to view the Rancho Period—the time between Mexican Independence from Spain in 1822 and California’s admission to the United States in 1850—with a romanticized nostalgia. The reality of California’s Rancho Period, however, was certainly much harsher for its denizens. They were probably not, as Pierce Benedict, scion of one of the city’s founding families, wrote in his 1934 history, “a people prosperous and carefree, browned by the bland sunshine with nothing more urgent than watching the clouds shift patterns,”1 or what present-day festivals around the state celebrate as a time of endless barbecues, dances, and mariachi music. In fact, considering Mexico’s enormous political instability at the time, the California Rancho Period of Alta California didn’t stand a chance of sustained existence. The wheels had started to come off the bus of Mexico’s expanded country almost immediately after its independence from Spain. First Texas broke away, was briefly an independent republic recognized by the United States, France, and England, and then, in 1845, subsequently joined the United States. Even before gold was discovered in 1848, Alta California was in play as well. The United States made the first move on Mexican California in 1845, when the U.S.-commissioned explorer John C. Frémont and a group of armed men under his command assisted in the “Bear Flag Revolt” in Sonoma, helping local U.S. immigrants in Alta California take the same tack Texas had by declaring California a republic. Pretty much all that is left of that endeavor is the state flag, which features a California grizzly bear and the words “California Republic.”