Blood and Oranges
Page 38
“I wanted to ask about your father, Ms. Mull, a man who’s long interested me. I’ve done some research on Eddie Mull for my thesis.” He paused. “I’m not sure how to put this: Your life, and your sister’s life, were so different from his, so strangely different, almost like you set out to undo what he did; or do the opposite, yin and yang. Am I right about that? What’s your view of your father a half century later?”
She smiled, brushed back a strand of hair, closed the book on the stand in front of her so she could see only the cover, a brilliant gold, green and blue panorama of the city of the angels nestled in the valley under the beautiful mountains. She read the title:
THE MULLS:
A 20th Century history of Los Angeles.
She ran her hand over the smooth dust jacket. “Eddie Mull was a character right out of Ayn Rand: He succeeded, and it cost him his life, a life that had been, let’s be honest, ruthless and selfish, just as Rand likes it. He had few friends and mostly ignored his family. He ran roughshod over people. When he died, he left a fortune, which the Mull Foundation is now using for many good causes, none better than to defeat Summa, a company now run, in an ugly twist of fate, by Eddie’s grandson.”
“But did you defeat Summa?” cried a man in the front row. “I’ve been down there. I’ve seen Playa Vista.”
“Playa Vista is an abomination,” she said, “full of darkness and gloom. This is not the sunny place of mountains and beaches and marshes where I grew up. Howard Hughes would be appalled to see what they did to his land. I suspect Playa Vista will be torn down some day and the earth restored, like San Francisco did with the Embarcadero Freeway. Playa Vista will be recognized as a dreadful mistake, like my father’s oil wells.”
She drank thirstily. Her eyes had begun to hurt. Something in the air.
“But here’s the thing: Playa Vista got the Hughes airfield, but that’s all it got. Loyola Marymount University has the misfortune to look down on Playa Vista under its cliffs, but if it lifts its eyes just a bit it sees beyond to the marshes and the wildlife, to the beach and the ocean, all as they should be, all as nature made them, free of oil derricks. And it sees Marina del Rey, which shows how man can imitate nature when he tries, instead of destroying it. Eddie Mull did one good thing: He left enough money so his family could undo all the bad he had done. We balanced the ledger.”
At the side, she saw Kenny slip into the room, Doctor Kenny, the gentle English major Nelly thought was not quite good enough for Didi, had arrived from the hospital. Beside him was Dominique, each holding a child by the hand, Kenny with Eric, Dominique with little Maggie. The children waved, and she smiled back.
“Did we defeat Summa? It is a fair question. Yes, they got the airfield, but they owned property down to the beach and north to Ballona. That’s why they called it Playa Vista, which means ‘view of the beach.’ But they have no view of the beach and never will have. That was our victory.”
“How is Los Angeles better today from what it would have been without the Mulls?” asked an elderly gentleman with wispy white hair. “Can you sum the story up in a few words? We’re not here just for the wine and cheese, you know.”
She took a deep breath while people chuckled and glanced toward the wine and the cheese tables. “A few words, you say. How about this? It is a story of water, oil, land, money, religion, newspapers, aviation, movies, construction, destruction, corruption, murder, birth, death, love, defeat, and victory.” She found herself laughing and coughing. “Everything but an earthquake. What else can possibly happen? Surely, there’s nothing left.”
But there was. The air was growing heavier, and she noticed people with their hands up suddenly bringing them down and nervously looking around. Handkerchiefs were coming out. Suddenly, the shrill sound of an alarm brought people to their feet.
“That’s the fire system,” announced the librarian calmly into the microphone. “I’m afraid we’ll have to leave the building. Nothing serious, I hope. Please take your belongings and follow me out through the rotunda and down the stairs.”
Lizzie waved toward Maggie, Cal, and the others as she grabbed the phone from the desk near the podium. The air was smoky. She would call the newspaper and report a fire. Instincts die hard.
“Who is this calling please?” said a voice on Metro desk.
“My name is Elizabeth Mull. I’m at the central library and I want to report a fire. I don’t know how serious it is,” she paused to listen, “but I can already hear the trucks. Maybe you hear them, too.”
“Hold on, please . . . “
“Hold on . . . ? But there’s a fire here!”
“Lizzie, is that you? Teddy Lubrano here.”
“Teddy, my goodness. It’s been so long. Yes, it is me, at the central library, which is on fire. I think it’s arson, and I think I saw the boy who set it.”
“I’ve got people on the way.Times car. Give them everything you have. Wait outside on Fifth Street. You stay there, Lizzie, don’t you move.”
They followed the others out of the children’s room, people moving steadily but nervously across the main room and down the stairs, bumping a little more than they meant to do, in a hurry but not a panic, handkerchiefs still out as breathing was hard in the acrid air. Kenny was carrying Eric, Cal, little Maggie.
The shrill scream of the fire alarm merged with the sirens of the fire engines as they reached the ground floor, were swept out the door by twos and onto the sidewalk. They crossed the street while Lizzie searched for theTimes’s car. Lots of smoke but no flames—fire still trapped inside, feeding on books from across the ages, seeking nourishment to break out. The crowd stood stunned, quiet, awed by the uncontrolled brutality of fire, listening, watching, glass shattering, wood cracking, timbers falling, sirens, smoke pouring out, fire finally making it through broken windows, flames licking out, desperate for oxygen.
They stood together, holding hands. Three women, two men, two children, one extended family.
Cal put his arms around the sisters, who each held a child by the hand. “Fitting end to the Mull story,” he said, softly. Dominique watched him, wondering.
Lizzie turned to him. “Meaning?”
“Starts in water . . . ends in fire.”
She looked down at the children, smiling at little Maggie and squeezing her hand.
“Ends? Won’t that depend on what these two have to say about it?”
Coda
They caught the blond man, a compulsive liar and exhibitionist named Harry Peak. He was arrested, but never charged, though there wasn’t much doubt that he did it. He’d told friends about it. Lizzie could not identify him. The boy she’d seen had long hair. Harry had short hair. Detectives found his barber. Only one other person had noticed him that day, and she wasn’t sure either. It was mere coincidence that Harry picked the day of her reading to set the fire. Nothing personal. Didn’t know a thing about the Mulls.
Harry sued the city for $15 million for false arrest. The city counter-sued for $23 million, the estimated value of the lost property. He was paid $35,000 in a settlement. More than a million books were consumed, priceless ancient monographs to contemporary pulp. Fire didn’t know the difference. The library stayed closed for seven years. Harry didn’t have time to enjoy his money. He died of AIDs. Life returned to Los Angeles normal.
Westport Beach Club, 1938, looking north toward Venice oil fields.
Acknowledgments
I will start with my parents, who had the good sense in 1945 to head west. We’d been an eastern family up to then. I was eight years old and about to discover the greatest place in the world. We lived at the beach. There was only one freeway, the Pasadena. I rode the trolley downtown and to Venice and Ocean Park. I fell in love with Los Angeles.
As for writing, the first tip of the hat would be to Charles McCabe of the San Francisco Chronicle, the “Fearless Spectator,�
� who helped me land my first newspaper job in that once great newspaper city, although I was completely unqualified. Next would be Sandy Zalburg, city editor at the Honolulu Advertiser, who taught me how to write. Years after I left Honolulu in a huff, Zalburg, spying an article of mine in the New York Times Magazine, wrote to me as follows: “Enfin, I said to myself, the twit is learning how to write tersely. Mazel tov.” Other fine editors along the way who helped: Henry Bradshaw and Larry McManus in San Francisco, Buddy Weiss and George Bates in Paris, James Chace in New York. A writer’s education never stops.
The road from newspapers to fiction is a bumpy one. After years of suppressing opinion and imagination—just the facts, ma’am—you suddenly face blank pages demanding opinion and imagination. You meet new kinds of editors, ones less concerned with writing tersely than with telling a good story. I was fortunate to find editors like George Walsh at Macmillan, Sheryl and Harold Maguire at the Local History Company, David Wilk at Prospecta Press, and literary agents like Tom Wallace.
Beyond editors, acknowledgment is owed to colleagues, mentors, supporters, people who helped smooth the path. I would single out Bill Bundy at Foreign Affairs, Flora Lewis at the New York Times, Tom Hughes at the Carnegie Endowment, Don Cook and Chuck Champlin at the Los Angeles Times, Neil Morgan at the San Diego Tribune, people willing to take a certain risk, believing it would all work out in the end.
They were right. This story, my story, the story of twentieth century Los Angeles, owes something to all of them. As for relatives and friends, I would single out my sister, Carol, who had to take three buses to Marlborough School after they junked the trolleys; my brother, Bill, who was only two years old when we hit the coast and thus regards himself as a true native; and Bobby Taylor, who first showed me how to explore the Ballona wetlands in a raft.
Copyright © 2021 James Oliver Goldsborough
All rights reserved.
No portion of this book may be reproduced in any fashion, print, facsimile, or electronic, or by any method yet to be developed, without the express written permission of the publisher.
Published by:
City Point Press
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Paperback ISBN 978-1-947951-30-3
eBook ISBN 978-1-947951-31-0
Book and cover design by Barbara Aronica-Buck
Map illustration by Georgana Winters
Beach Club photo that follows the Coda, courtesy T.O. McCoye