A Student of History, page 6
That was possible—but it didn’t mean I’d ever have access to them, or that Mrs. W— would ever tell me about them. “Maybe. But right now I only have her papers.”
I could see Professor Rose making an effort to contain herself. “Well, it’s a place to start. And it sounds like much more than we’ve ever had access to before.”
I noted the we—the entitlement of historians, the co-opting of a student’s findings by the professor who oversees him, the assumption that private records are naturally the province of a waiting and interested public.
“Well, I can see,” I said. “I can see if there’s anything in her writings. And maybe that will lead to something else.”
“Maybe it will. Maybe it will.” Professor Rose was alert now; her straight posture, her eyes, even the tapping of her pen, all betrayed her excitement, that historian’s bloodlust, like a hunting dog that’s just picked up a juicy scent. It occurred to me that any new insights into the W—s might benefit her as well. She held a distinguished professorship, but maybe she longed to become a dean, and maybe her student’s accomplishment could help.
“Listen,” she said, leaning farther over the desk, “if you figure this out, if you find something about the early fortunes of the W— family, this goes beyond just a dissertation. This would be the most exciting new development in the history of Los Angeles that we’ve had for many years.”
“So . . .” I started stupidly, “does that mean you might still be willing to recommend me for the fellowship?”
She looked at me, blinked quickly, then laughed. “The fellowship! Yes, of course, with this lead, if you can pull it off, I’d recommend you for a renewal of your fellowship. But this is much bigger, Rick. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. This could be a book. And the ticket to a job. Hell, we might even hire you here at USC!”
My heart was pounding and my hands were sweating; I was feeling a bit of whiplash. I’d gone from losing my fellowship to practically being offered a job in the space of ten minutes. “Well, what do you want to see before you write the recommendation?” I asked.
“You’ve got two weeks,” she said. “Bring me something. Bring me something interesting about the W—s. Just a piece of information that hasn’t been out there before—an anecdote, a quote, a bit of history—and that’ll be enough to give me the confidence that you’ll produce something special over the next year.”
I gulped and thought for the first time about what I had done. Instead of just typing up Mrs. W—’s journal, I’d be trying to convince her to let me write about her family. For a second I felt a wave of guilt for bringing the W—s up with Professor Rose. But then I thought of the alternative—losing my fellowship, losing everything. Living on Top Ramen and grocery-store bagels, and the shame of admitting failure to my family. Mrs. W— was my only way out.
And besides, maybe I didn’t really need to go down this path. I could give Professor Rose an interesting tidbit or two right now, to prove that I had access to the papers. But then, I could just pretend to look into Mrs. W—’s family. Doing that would at least buy me another year of funding, and in that time I could get back to work on my real topic. I wouldn’t really be violating a confidence, I told myself. I was just playing the card that I had.
* * *
Over the next few days, I found out everything I could about the W— family. I started on the Internet, where a search returned only about forty references to Mrs. W—’s grandfather, Langley, and fewer about Robert, her father. As Professor Rose had said, very little had been written about the family directly; most of what I found were references in the biographies of other men. I found these books deep in the archives of the USC library, as well as old, yellowed copies of the Herald-Examiner and the Los Angeles Times. From these various sources, I learned that the W—s were an old New Hampshire family—mostly farmers, including Langley’s father, James, who’d hired himself out to work on other people’s property and never owned land himself. Langley had come to California in 1898 to join a distant cousin who had a position on a ranch near Fresno. After two years of chasing ranch jobs up and down the state, he settled in Southern California, where he worked as an oil driller for a couple of established companies, and then managed to buy, in those early preboom days, a small plot of land in Los Angeles. That plot did produce some oil—but it was the duller, brown, unscenic land he purchased in Kern County that led to the explosion of Langley’s wealth, for on that Central Valley land, 130 miles north of Los Angeles, a massive new oil field was discovered—oil to fuel the burgeoning industries of automobiles and trains; oil that helped spur the growth of Southern California and the western half of the United States. With investment capital from a pool of donors, Langley bought more oil-rich lands, invented and distributed a new kind of drill bit sharpener, purchased a stake in a company that built a pipeline to the ocean—and quickly became one of the richest men in the state. He bought property in what eventually became Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, Palos Verdes, and Newport, quintupling his investment when those areas were developed. At the age of thirty, he built a huge estate just off of Sunset Boulevard, in what were then the outskirts of the city.
He was also, at least according to these accounts, a decent man—he hired other young men who’d traveled out from his hometown, and was known, even after he’d grown unimaginably rich, to grab a shovel at a work site and join his men. He gave prodigious amounts of money to various causes, particularly orphans and veterans, and eventually became a board member and large donor of the university where I was now languishing. In the two pictures I found of him in the Los Angeles Times, he looked handsome and like a bit of a swashbuckler—hair surprisingly long, sweeping mustache, and a glint in his eye that suggested there was either a bottle of whiskey or a pretty and possibly unclad woman just outside the camera’s range. He’d suffered from heart problems, though, and had finally succumbed to a heart attack at sixty-eight, as if so much life, lived so intensely, had overwhelmed his system.
His son Robert had been cut from a different cloth. The heir to a fortune he’d had no part in creating, he made savvy, self-serving decisions—subdividing and selling off parts of the family’s coastal properties, and continuing the development of several of the family’s Westside holdings. But he’d had a conflict with his father over the oil business—he’d wanted to take it public rather than keeping it in the family—and more personal differences too. Whereas Langley was big-spirited, down to earth, and gregarious, Robert was calculated and reserved. Langley took plenty of risks and failed as often as he succeeded, and the wealth that resulted from his better bets seemed like a bonus, not the point. But for Robert, the inheritor, preserving and expanding wealth was his life’s occupation, and there was nothing fun or adventurous about it. Several articles—old, yellowing Los Angeles Times pieces I was thrilled to hold in my hands—described Robert as merciless or a ruthless businessman, unconcerned with human consequence if a profit was at stake. In his pictures—and there were more of them than there had been of his father—he was clean-cut and straight-backed, dark hair combed severely off his forehead. He was always posed formally, in a suit and tie, unsmiling. He looked, to tell the truth, like a stick in the mud.
And yet this was the man that Mrs. W— adored, and in whose eyes she’d been the proverbial apple. Their bond must have been even more intense because of the other thing I learned from my research—that Robert’s other child, and only son, had died at eighteen.
This was news to me; Mrs. W— hadn’t mentioned a sibling. But she’d had a brother, named Langley after his grandfather, three years older than her. Langley had died his freshman year at USC of unexplained causes, leaving fifteen-year-old Marion in effect an only child, living with her parents in their mansion in Bel Air. Her mother, Barbara, was the daughter of another oil family; other than two references to her charity work, there was nothing of her in the books or the papers. I wondered if the closeness with her father Mrs. W— spoke of was largely forged from this time. It occurred to me that I should read the first two hundred pages of Mrs. W—’s memoir, which must have included these sad events.
There was plenty of mention of Mrs. W— herself in public record, where she was identified as her father’s only heir when he died, and some news stories connected her to the sale of her family’s oil holdings, which had made her a billionaire. But most accounts of her were in the old society pages of the Los Angeles Times. The first reference was from 1952, when she was sixteen, announcing her debutante party. The girl in this picture stunningly resembled the woman I’d meet more than fifty years later. The face was a girl’s face, fresh and more open—but the haughtiness was the same, as well as a quality in her expression, something sardonic and more than typically self-aware. This expression stayed consistent through her early twenties, as she was escorted to various social events by a succession of wealthy young men, some of whose family names I recognized, before marrying—in 1960—Baron J—, himself the heir of another of California’s royal families, the son of an timber magnate, and also a decorated pilot in the Second World War. I recognized Baron’s family name—it graced a number of buildings around town. There was a series of photographs of the J—s looking young, handsome, and untouchable, attending various functions. They had three children in eight years—two boys and a girl—and Baron was brought into the W— family business. All seemed to be going well until 1968, when Baron, who was sixteen years older than Mrs. W—, contracted a rare form of brain cancer and was dead within months. And there was Marion, a widow at thirty-two, with three small children to raise by herself.
There was little mention of Mrs. W— in the press for several years, except in the obituaries of her parents, who died just months apart, where she was listed as the sole surviving child. Then there was a rather salacious story from 2002 involving her youngest son, who’d been caught in some kind of after-hours club, much to the clucking of the Times’ society editor, in the company of a disreputable woman. When Mrs. W— did appear again, she’d resumed using her family name, which caused a stir in itself, and the tone of the stories was different. They were mostly about her appearances at charity functions, or her fashion sense, or her growing collection of expensive modern art. There was an article about a commercial real estate development in Malibu in which she was a partner, and another about her family foundation. But anything remotely personal or revealing was wiped clean—an erasure or obfuscation that was aided by the demise of the society section.
Staring at my computer late at night, or sitting hunched over a desk at the library, I felt both full and unsatisfied, glad to be sorting through this trove of information, but unsure of what exactly it meant. As with all written history, what intrigued me the most was what was left out of the record. What had it been like for young Marion to grow up with such a humorless father? How had her brother died? Why did she never remarry? And why, after the one article about her youngest son’s debacle, was there no mention of her children?
I wanted to talk to someone, but there was no one to approach: no scholar who had insight into the W—’s story, no journalist who’d written an account. Of course, the one person I could have asked was Janet, who’d introduced me in the first place—but given the dangerous territory I was venturing into, I didn’t want to involve her.
Janet had been my best friend at USC. We’d met our first semester at a poker game, where I’d been dragged by a classmate from Stanford. He’d just started at the law school, and we went to the apartment of a couple of other first-years—where, he promised, the stakes were high, the liquor flowed, and a cute girl named Sylvia would be mixing cocktails. I wasn’t much of a poker player, and was uncomfortable around all those grunting alpha types, but I immediately liked Janet—a college friend of one of the law school guys, and the only woman playing. She dealt and grinned slyly, occasionally raising her beer in my direction like I was in on a secret. In the end, she outplayed the guys, took the cash, and went home with the girl—Sylvia, the architect, with whom she now lived in San Francisco. After that night, I ditched my college friend in favor of Janet. She was the one grad student I could stand to hang out with, my other constant besides Chloe—and now, like Chloe, she too was gone.
* * *
The next Tuesday, at Mrs. W—’s house, I returned to her journals with new purpose. As I slogged my way through the monotonous pages, I started to read about some of the happenings I’d seen in the clippings—the parties that were mentioned in the paper, her early years with her husband. But there was little mention of her grandfather. Even if there had been, I wasn’t sure it would be much help. The truth was, her prose was dull. Because this was her life, the only life she knew, she didn’t see it as extraordinary; she couldn’t place it in any context. She didn’t accord it the wonder that other people did. But even if her writing had been the most engaging in the world, it was clear it wouldn’t get me what I needed—something that would convince Professor Rose that there was fresh new information about Langley W— and the origins of the city. I needed to find out if her father or grandfather had left papers themselves—and I needed a way to get to them.
The written accounts were no substitute, either, for the woman herself. Each day, after I had finished my work, she’d invite me to join her for iced tea or lemonade—sometimes, when it was warm enough, out on the patio; sometimes in one of the sitting rooms, where she’d show me some new abstract sculpture or painting she’d bought, whose meaning I couldn’t surmise. By this point she’d taken me to see more of the house—the various living rooms, each with a chandelier and fireplace; the wood-paneled library; the theater room with a full screen and large stuffed chairs; the laundry room with five industrial-strength washing machines. There were bars built into nooks after every few rooms, in case you needed a drink on your travels. This was a place built for parties, though the guests were all gone—if they’d ever been there at all. Now it was like a museum, a remnant of a different age. I didn’t know how Mrs. W— made the decision of where to sit each day—but she did, and I followed her lead. Although she was always dressed in some impeccable outfit—she didn’t seem to believe in casual—she’d sit with one of the dogs on her lap and ask how far I’d gotten that day. Then she’d offer commentary more interesting than what I’d just seen on the page.
“That Cecil Biscott,” she began, about the man from whom she’d purchased a huge real estate holding in the South Bay, “he was married to the biggest slut in Beverly Hills, and he was so busy trying to keep other men’s hands from up her skirt that his business fell apart.”
Or, about an overdemanding artist whose show she sponsored at the museum: “He wanted a separate truck to ship each of his individual pieces, including one petrified tree stump he called ‘The Root of the World.’ I could have pulled a better stump out of my own backyard. Can you believe it? I wasn’t going to pay for that turd.”
Or, about a gentleman who’d courted her after her husband died: “He wanted me to see him exclusively, but I wasn’t going to commit. Remember: multiple choice is always better.”
On Thursday, during my last visit for that week, it was just warm enough to sit outside. I finally ventured the nerve to ask, “Mrs. W—, when I’m finished typing your journals, are you going to make them available to the public?”
She looked at me as if I’d suggested cutting the dogs up to eat with our crackers. “Make them available? Why, of course not. We’ll have them printed and bound to keep here at the house, in case my children ever care to learn about their mother.”
“That’s all? They’ll just be for the family?”
She placed her teacup down with a violent clank, and I couldn’t tell if she was caught off guard or angry. “That is plenty. And it’s in keeping with how my family has always done things. My father’s letters to my mother are bound and boxed in this house. My grandfather kept only a few of his papers—although some of his friends at the Colonial Club did put together a collection of remembrances. You’ll see, as you get further along, that I do write more about his life and accomplishments. But that is all for the benefit of my children and grandchildren. It isn’t meant to be part of the public record.”
“Well, that’s a shame, don’t you think?” I glanced at Mrs. W— and then looked out at the canyon, where a red-tailed hawk flew across our line of vision, harassed by a small, persistent bird. “I mean, your family has been integral to the formation of the city. But the Dohenys and Chandlers and Otises have gotten all the credit. It’s like you said a couple of weeks ago—more people should know your story.”
Mrs. W— shook her head and shifted in her chair, enough that the dog jumped off her lap. “We have never been the sort to self-aggrandize. Even when I sold my grandfather’s business, people were surprised by the extent of our holdings. They had no idea we were so immensely rich.”
This was true. The news accounts of the sale were breathless; it was one of the largest transactions ever involving a privately held company—an enterprise whose size and scope had previously been obscured.
“Why did you decide to sell?” I asked.
She hesitated; I knew I was taking a risk by pushing her. “The time was right; the demand for oil was so great.” Now she emitted a disgusted huff. “Besides, oil is not a business for women.”
I let this sit, half-curious and half-amused. Whatever Mrs. W— thought of oil, she certainly hadn’t shied away from business.
“But having a written record of your family wouldn’t be self-aggrandizing,” I argued. “It would be filling in a crucial part of our city’s history. If you don’t mind my saying so, I think it would be hugely valuable.”
Mrs. W— was quiet for so long I wasn’t sure she’d heard this last part. But finally she asked, “And why are you so interested, young man?”
