Water to the Angels: William Mulholland, His Monumental Aqueduct, and the Rise of Los Angeles

by Standiford, Les

  As to William Mulholland’s portrayal in the film, and while Catherine Mulholland may have complained about the portrayal of Hollis Mulwray as an ineffectual cipher, it might seem to many that in his screenplay, Towne let the water superintendent off rather easily, compared to Noah Cross, for example. “I never thought William Mulholland was a bad guy,” Towne agrees. “But the men whom I combined into Noah Cross for the film, they were monsters.”

  And as to who these monsters were in actuality? “One prototype was Harrison Gray Otis,” Towne says, “and also Harry Chandler [Otis’s son-in-law and ultimately a Times editor], and some others went into the character of Cross. They were all motivated by greed, pure and simple.” Accordingly, that became the theme of Chinatown, he says: “The lust for money and power.”

  Regarding the role of Fred Eaton and Mulholland in acquiring the water and bringing an aqueduct to Los Angeles, Towne was asked to make a final verdict: In the end, was the building of the Los Angeles Aqueduct a great achievement? Or an example of American business skullduggery at its finest?

  “I think it was a bit of both,” Towne replied. “Mulholland’s physical achievement was significant, but if he had been willing to build a dam further up the Owens Valley, ranchers and farmers there could have flourished along with Los Angeles.”

  As to how much Mulholland knew about the plans of Otis, Chandler, and others to profit from the sales of what would have been otherwise worthless lands in the San Fernando valley, Towne is less certain. “It is hard to say how much he knew,” Towne says, “but he was a pragmatist. He wanted to bring water to Los Angeles, and if it took getting along with people like Otis to allow it to happen, he may have overlooked some things.”

  For the record, no one has ever put forward credible evidence of collusion between Mulholland and Otis. He had only spoken to Otis twice, Mulholland testified in 1911, once on official business and once when he ran into him in a store on Christmas Eve. The most likely explanation for the land syndicate’s actions seems obvious at this remove: influential businessman Moses Sherman, who had become a member of the water commission by 1905, got wind of Mulholland’s intentions concerning the aqueduct and its route and suggested to his syndicate partners that they quickly exercise their options on the San Fernando Valley lands.

  In the end, Towne disclaimed any imaginings of the success his first screenplay would engender. When the lights went up following the film’s first public screening, he told himself, “Well, maybe it’s not a complete disaster.” Of course he could not have predicted the acclaim and lasting influence of the film, Towne says, but there was one thing that did surprise him. “I never expected the controversy that it caused.” Then he adds, with a dramatist’s timing, “Of course I didn’t mind it, either.”

  CITY OF ANGELS

  IT WOULD NOT APPEAR THAT ROBERT TOWNE VIEWS HIMSELF as the final authority on William Mulholland and his legacy, but it is just as clear that he feels he has nothing to apologize for. And while the historical references alone cannot account for the ultimate power of an exquisitely made film, it seems just as impossible to imagine Chinatown working its legendary spell upon viewers without the allusions—however distinct from reality—to the actual events that took place.

  As cultural commentator Ian S. Scott has recently noted, Chinatown, however fictionalized, retains its power for contemporary viewers because it “is in actual fact a prophetic vision of L.A. to come and a resemblance of the developments and personalities that have dominated recent times rather more than the Depression era.” The film continues to engage, in Scott’s view, “in the position of historical signifier for a series of developments that somehow delineate the identity and outlook of California in general, and Los Angeles in particular.”

  This writer might put it more simply: Academy Award–winning scripts are not written about dull matter. Whether true or fictive, a good story is a good story. And one thing is certain: without Towne’s choice of subject matter upon which to base his narrative, this writer would likely never have extrapolated “Mulholland” away from “Drive,” and the account at hand would likely not have come to be. Towne may in fact have been inspired to invest his fictive story with the power of history; the present aim is to demonstrate that history contains compelling drama. It is impossible to know what thoughts ran through the mind of William Mulholland as he sat in an overstuffed chair bundled in a suit before a bay window of a beach house at Santa Monica and stared out at the relentless surf, but one can suspect. “I took a vacation once,” Mulholland once recalled. “I spent an afternoon at Long Beach. I was bored to death from loafing and came back to work next morning.” Certainly, even if he was not afflicted at times by thoughts of the great losses from the St. Francis collapse, he must have felt a bit bereft.

  For more than fifty years he had “only wanted the work,” and now the work was gone. He had tended the flow of the water to the City of Angels from very nearly the first day he laid eyes upon it, had nurtured, grown, and protected that flow until it became a cascade that fed a city beyond anyone’s capacity to imagine. Surely—even if history had decreed that instead of coming west, William Mulholland was to lose an injured leg and become a Cincinnati beggar—the city would have found its water somehow, somewhere, sometime. Surely. But on the other hand, Mulholland is the essential fact of the historical matter, and how could he have been content to sit quietly without his work to do?

  In December 1932, his old friend Fred Eaton finally realized a three-decades-old ambition when he sold his Long Valley cattle ranch to the City of Los Angeles. But the price paid by the city—$650,000—was far less than the $1 million he had always dreamed of, and the money was not only too little but too late. In another of history’s ironies, Eaton had been among the victims of the Watterson bank collapse, which took with it the $200,000 that Eaton had on deposit. In 1932, his ranch was foreclosed upon to satisfy a mortgage that had been arranged by the Wattersons without Eaton’s knowledge. Thus, the city’s purchase, at the ranch’s appraised value, amounted to little more than a wash for Eaton, who by then had suffered a stroke and was in failing health.

  In the aftermath of the sale and the settling of a mountain of debts, Eaton—then living in Los Angeles with his son Burdick “Bud” Eaton, chief engineer for the Huntington Electric Railroad (forerunner of today’s Metro system)—turned to one last concern. He sent word to William Mulholland, to whom he had not spoken in nearly five years, that he would like to meet.

  Hearing the request, Mulholland, who had never spoken an untoward word about Eaton in public, donned his hat without hesitation and had himself driven to the Eaton home. “Hello, Fred,” Mulholland said, upon being ushered into Eaton’s room. And in the few minutes that ensued, one very old wound was healed. (While no details of that final meeting were recorded, Hal Eaton, Fred’s great-grandson, says that the story was likely passed along to writer Remi Nadeau by Bud Eaton and that in any case, Nadeau’s version reflects what has been passed down within the Eaton family.)

  On March 11, 1934, Eaton died, the news brought to Mulholland by his daughter Rose. Mulholland sat pensively for a few moments, then finally glanced up at her. “I’ve been dreaming about Fred,” he told her. “Three nights in a row. The two of us were walking along, young and virile like we used to be.” He paused again. “Yet I knew we were both dead.”

  A little more than a year later, both were dead. Mulholland’s body lay in state at City Hall, and on July 26, 1935, his funeral services were held at the Little Church of the Flower at Forest Lawn Memorial Park. He was eulogized by attorney Joseph Scott, who called him the “human dynamo” who made Los Angeles what it had become. Mulholland’s was a huge soul, Scott said, his example an estimable one, given “these days of alibi artists and buck passers and time servers.” Another contemporary wrote, “He had little piety, much strength, great ambition. There is no one else in sight, past or present, whom Los Angeles is more likely to remember.” His estate, estimated at $700,000 (composed
principally of his home and 640 acres of ranch land assembled over time in the San Fernando Valley), was to be divided between his children—Perry, Tom, Lucile, Ruth, and Rose. Rose, in addition to her share, received the home near Third and Western.

  As the saying goes, one could write a book about all that has devolved in the time since Mulholland’s passing. In fact, many have been written, and it is likely that many more will be written. With Fred Eaton’s ranch in hand, the long-discussed dam at Long Valley was built, though the dream of using those waters to feed a vast irrigation project in the Owens Valley never materialized. The city acquired water rights from the Mono Basin Watershed above the Owens Valley in the 1930s and 1940s, and a second aqueduct paralleling the first was completed in 1970 to bring more water from the distant region to the city.

  By 1945, Los Angeles had acquired 88 percent of the total town property in the Owens Valley, paying a premium of anywhere between 45 and 120 percent above 1929 appraisal figures in lieu of reparations payments. By 1945 the city was also the owner of 278,055 acres of farmlands in the valley, just under 99 percent of the total. While some of that property has been sold off and returned through various exchange programs establishing reservations for Native American tribes and the like, it is estimated that the city still owns at least 25 percent of the valley floor, including more than 90 percent of the land that is usable. According to Los Angeles Department of Water and Power’s (LADWP) Fred Barker, 94.4 percent of the entirety of Inyo County is in the hands of the US government or the State of California. The City of Los Angeles owns 3.9 percent. Private lands amount to 1.7 percent.

  One study says that there are today about 3,000 irrigated acres planted in hay and alfalfa, and 8,000 acres are irrigated as pasture, with one private citizen claiming to make several thousand dollars a year raising chili peppers. Meanwhile, litigation between the city and Owens Valley officials over water issues has continued into the twenty-first century, including wrangles over the city’s rate of groundwater pumping and the restoration of the lower Owens River and the marshlands surrounding Owens Lake, as well as a recent fight in Lone Pine to reclaim control of business frontage along US 395.

  Rancor over issues first raised in 1905 persists, not only on the page and in the courtroom, but in ordinary life as well, as the tale told to the Los Angeles Times by latter-day saboteur Mark Berry attests: On the night of September 14, 1976, while he and pal Robert Howe were killing time, waiting for their girlfriends to get off work at a local ice-cream parlor, they bought a six-pack and drove to a turn-out close by the former course of the Owens River near Lone Pine. They were walking along the dry riverbed when Berry says his friend Howe boiled over. “They’re not letting any water out. I’m going to fix this once and for all.”

  In short order, the pair had availed themselves of two cases of dynamite stored at a country trail-clearing facility. They drove to a set of gates on the aqueduct where they lodged one case in the middle of the structure, lit a five-foot fuse, and ran for cover. In minutes, there was an explosion, and soon 100 million gallons of aqueduct water were rushing back into the riverbed and toward Owens Lake. The two were later apprehended, with the older Howe serving ninety days in the county jail and high-schooler Berry spending a month in juvenile detention. Part of his sentence required that Berry enroll in a nearby junior college, where he studied—what else?—rocket science.

  Getting caught and sentenced was the best thing that ever happened to him, Berry later said. He returned to Lone Pine in 2000 after a career in aviation engineering had taken him around the West. His new employer was, as irony would decree, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. As Berry told a somewhat stupefied reporter, “There was a time when the DWP did whatever it wanted to around here,” Berry said. “But times have changed, and so have I. The DWP has done heroic work on behalf of the Owens Valley.”

  Berry rose from the lawn chair where he had been telling his tale and led the Times reporter to an overlook atop a cliff on the outskirts of Lone Pine. He gestured out at a vista of mountainside streams, lava beds, and plunging rock formations, the likes of which have drawn any number of filmmakers, artists, rock hounds, recluses, fishermen, and tourists of various stripes. Berry was happy, for one, that urban sprawl had been precluded in the Owens Valley. For him, he said, it was “the most beautiful place on Earth.”

  For its part, the DWP, though surprised to learn that a former aqueduct bomber was now on its payroll, seemed inclined to let bygones be bygones. The incident was “a reflection of a period of much more tense relations between people in the Owens Valley and L.A.,” said aqueduct manager Jim Yannotta, who pointed out that Berry had also been held accountable and served his time. “We are grateful that relations have improved.”

  As for who could have fired that stick of dynamite into the Mulholland Memorial Fountain, the day after his own wrong-headed action, Berry claimed not to have a clue. “I don’t know who fired it,” he told the reporter with a smile. “But it wasn’t me.”

  One would likely be cautious about raising a toast to the memory of Bill Mulholland in any Owens Valley tavern where locals congregate, just as one might want to avoid praising Andrew Carnegie in any mill town bar near Pittsburgh, where memories of a steel strike quashed more than a century ago by the fabled entrepreneur could still prompt a fistfight. History is not a dead issue in certain places.

  Catherine Mulholland says that for many years her family regularly signed into hotels in the Owens Valley using her mother’s maiden name. And even though the August 31, 1990, issue of Life magazine listed Mulholland among its selection of the 100 Most Influential Americans of the Twentieth Century, along with Albert Einstein, the Wright Brothers, and Henry Ford, the honor did not necessarily cut any ice in some quarters in Los Angeles. A series of L.A. Weekly articles published shortly thereafter characterized Mulholland not as a hero, but as a “Vengeful Master Builder,” he of “hooded, flinty eyes and grim and vindictive mouth.” Truly, “an entire valley had been destroyed by the Self-Made Man’s personal feud,” the piece assured readers, before concluding, in neobiblical terms, “its history run through the shredder, its people mocked and terrorized and cheated, and their farms spread with salt.”

  Then again, there are such publications as that by University of California at Santa Barbara economist Gary Libecap, Owens Valley Revisited, which argues that the Edenic view of the preaqueduct valley is little but a myth. Farming in the region was always an iffy business, Libecap points out, making reference to many a fact and figure, and most of those to whom offers were made were happy to take the city’s money and decamp. It is Libecap’s conclusion that many residents used the oft-cited characterizations of themselves as hapless victims in order to secure lucrative offers for land they would have had trouble selling otherwise.

  In November 2013, any number of events celebrated the centennial of the aqueduct water’s arrival in the San Fernando Valley, including the guiding of a hundred-mule pack train all the way from Independence that culminated in a clopping parade through the streets of Glendale. At the Cascade below Newhall Pass, DWP officials loosed a torrent down the spillway at 1:15 P.M. on November 5, 2013, one hundred years to the minute after Mulholland had presided over the ceremony celebrating the water’s original arrival. According to the Times, an actor playing Theodore Roosevelt (who did not attend in 1913) reminded those present that he had approved the project “for the good of all,” and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti put a contemporary spin on Mulholland’s fabled line when he pointed to the water rushing down the concrete steps and said to the crowd, “There it is. Conserve it.”

  Coming as it did in the midst of another cycle of drought in California, observation of the centennial was also the spur for any number of renewed criticisms of the Department of Water and Power, including a rehash of the original land acquisition controversies, the “Chinatown” conspiracies, and a thoroughgoing litany of misdirected contemporary water practices and waste. One could stand atop Mulho
lland Drive, “the supreme vantage point for the entirety of Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley,” and gaze out upon what has come to be, “and feel like Christ—or the Devil,” one commentator said. “Mulholland Drive allows both roles.”

  According to DWP figures, from 1913 to 1990 the Los Angeles Aqueduct supplied on average about 75 percent of the city’s water, with as much as 532,000 acre-feet of Owens Valley water flowing through the twin conduits in 1969, more than 80 percent of total consumption for the year. In normal years, rain and snow melt brings anywhere from 350,000 to 725,000 acre-feet into the valley. As much as 100,000 acre-feet is lost to evaporation and drainage into the ground, with another 80,000 to 100,000 acre-feet going to irrigation and stock watering in the valley. Another 5,000 to 6,000 goes to Native American lands, and 8,000 to 9,000 is used for recreation and wildlife purposes. The remainder goes into the aqueduct, though owing largely to the 1994 court-ordered restorations to Mono Lake, the Lower Owens River Restoration Project, and an air quality mitigation settlement requiring seasonal flooding of the flats surrounding Owens Lake, the net flow of the aqueduct has been reduced to between 100,000 and 150,000 acre-feet on average, or somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of the total city supply. The city still draws about 10 percent of its water from local groundwater wells (i.e., the Los Angeles River watershed), with the remainder purchased from the Metropolitan Water District, which is supplied by both the Colorado River Aqueduct and the California Aqueduct, which originates in the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta east of San Francisco.