by Jean Stein
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The world’s greatest oil well, Cerro Azul No. 4, Mexico, February 1916.
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JOHN CREEL: Edward Doheny realized how useful my great-uncle, Enrique Creel, could be for his agenda, since Enrique was a very prominent statesman and banker in Mexico with strong connections to President Díaz. When Enrique was the Mexican ambassador to the United States, Doheny gave a banquet in his honor at the exclusive Alexandria Hotel in Los Angeles. The event, called “one of the most notable ever given in California,” by the Los Angeles Examiner, featured Caviar Imperiale D’Astrakhan as a starter. Doheny even arranged for special fountains on the elliptical dinner table that spouted streams of red, white, and green, with the voice of Caruso serenading the guests from underneath the table. The event cost easily $150 a plate—in 1907 dollars—and was referred to as “a riot of extravagance” by the Examiner’s rival, the Los Angeles Times. I would have loved to have been there. They knew how to entertain, didn’t they?
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RICHARD RAYNER: Perhaps not coincidentally, a week before Doheny threw the banquet for Enrique Creel, private detectives in L.A. under orders from Creel brutally arrested the fugitive Mexican intellectual Ricardo Flores Magón, a leading anarchist who advocated for land reform in Mexico. Doheny managed to hold on to his bit of Mexico through an extraordinary dance of daring and corruption. It’s Doheny at his boldest.
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PATRICK “NED” DOHENY: Estelle was holding on for dear life then, with these periods of incredible loneliness when she never saw this person she’d married—and then boom, he would come back from Mexico. He was probably the richest man in the United States. Can you imagine what it would have been like to have found yourself in that situation, in that time? For god’s sakes, you go from being a telephone operator to having Steinway make you a piano with a bust of your child on either side of the keyboard? You can go look in the Steinway catalog. They made a piano with Ned’s head carved into it. This is not reality—this is an altered state.
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CAROLE WELLS DOHENY: Edward and Estelle were in San Francisco at the World’s Fair, and she saw this wonderful display from Pompeii with pink-and-black marble pillars. Eighteen of these pillars were in an oblong circle, and she said, “I would love to have that as a ballroom.” So he had it all dismantled and taken to Chester Place, where they made it into the ballroom. Wouldn’t you love to be able to say, “I’d love to have that,” and it was done?
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Edward and Estelle Doheny at their garden party, Los Angeles Times, June 24, 1915.
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The Pompeian Room in Edward L. Doheny’s mansion.
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RICHARD RAYNER: Doheny’s house doesn’t look like the kind of place you could imagine living in, but what they were aspiring to was really some sort of Gilded Age fantasy.
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PATRICK “NED” DOHENY: Ned is the missing man in this family, and having his name makes it all the weirder. I have no sense of what this person, my father’s father, was like. I would give anything to have met him. I miss him. I do. Not to have met him is to have him consigned to the shadows of someone else’s vision of him. Sometimes I think the subconscious reason that my parents called me Ned was to honor him or to connect him to me. It’s not been without difficulty, but maybe my relationship to this ancestor about whom I know absolutely nothing provides some form of healing. Because his mother took her own life, and to have your mother go that way, and then be whisked away yourself? I don’t know how much he saw, but it’s a horrible way to die, to have your insides eaten out that way. My great-grandfather, Pa D., made sure that his first wife, Carrie, was buried in a nice place. The new wife had the same name as Ned’s mother, although she was usually called by her middle name, Estelle. It must have just been very surreal.
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MARYANN BONINO: Ned had to have missed his mother, but Estelle genuinely and profusely showered him with love, and Ned embraced her almost immediately as Mama. Nonetheless the damage he’d sustained was deep, and he continued to act out. You see the misery in his face in photographs—even as he grew older.
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TOPSY DOHENY: In 1914 Ned married Lucy Smith, whom his parents liked and approved of. They had spent a lot of time together: Pa D. and Ma D. even took Ned and Lucy on an extended trip to Europe after he had been in the navy. That’s when the romance gelled, on the ship crossing the Atlantic. There’s nothing like shipboard romance. My understanding from my husband, Tim, is that’s how his parents got together.
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RICHARD RAYNER: They clearly hit it off. Lucy’s parents were very, very happy for her to go with the Dohenys on this European tour, which was clearly the moment when Doheny allowed himself to say, “I’ve really arrived, I’m going to take the break, we’re going to go to Europe. I’ll do some business there, but I’ll take Estelle and Ned, and we’ll swank it around.” William Randolph Hearst gave them his own personal guidebook to Europe. They went on the Olympic. Two years earlier when the Titanic, coming the other way, went down, Doheny was one of the first people to contact the Los Angeles Examiner, the Hearst paper, saying that he’d heard about the sinking ship. He little suspected that his own life, his own empire, would one day hit the iceberg that was Teapot Dome and start to sink beneath the waves.
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ANSON LISK: Ned was an only child, and when he and Lucy married, they decided to live in Beverly Hills and build Greystone. I lived right next to them in what was called the Doheny ranch. My father, who was married to Lucy’s older sister, managed and ran all the Doheny ranches scattered all over California. Ned and Lucy’s children were Dickie Dell and four boys: Larry, Bill, Pat, and Tim. I grew up with all of them. Lucy was kind of a martinet. She wanted to run everybody’s life and did. Even my mother and her brothers were under her thumb.
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ANN SMITH BLACK: My father was the brother of Lucy Smith Doheny, so as a child, I went with my father every other weekend to Greystone. My grandfather Smith was partly responsible for bringing the Santa Fe railroad west. My grandparents lived originally in Pasadena in a great big house that is still there, and Lucy Doheny and Ned Doheny were married there. Ned was going to USC and wanted to be a doctor.
Lucy was the youngest in her family, but when she married Ned Doheny, everyone began to defer to her. And she wanted them to. She could be tough. She never buffaloed me, but she did everybody else.
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LARRY NIVEN: My grandmother ruled with an iron hand. She was smallish, but feisty and quirky. Right from the start, she knew what her nickname ought to be, and she nailed it for us: “Sweetheart.” She wasn’t one, but she was amusing. She was at a party once, maybe at Greystone, and she ran across a guy whom she recognized. She said to him, “Don’t you know me?” He replied, “No, I think we haven’t met.” So she turned and bared her butt. It was her gynecologist.
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TOPSY DOHENY: Her nickname was Sweetheart, but in the immediate family—my husband, Tim, and all the rest of that generation—we all called her Mun. You knew right away she was someone you wouldn’t cross, and I was always half scared of her. She was strict. Once she actually broke the back of a hairbrush on Tim. But Tim didn’t care; he had a mind of his own and he wasn’t intimidated. He was the most rebellious, and nothing she said or did could scare him. One way to humiliate the boys was to put one of his sister Dickie’s old dresses on them and threaten to send them to school wearing it. She did this to all the boys growing up. When Tim was older and misbehaving as usual, his mother made him put the dress on. Of course he’d seen it already with the other boys, saw them all cower and give in, and he wasn’t going to do that. He didn’t cave at all. He started dancing around, saying, “Oh, it fits me so beautifully! This is just wonderful, Mother, I love it, I love it!” She was absolutely beside herself. She never tried that one again. Tim had enough of his mother in him that he just gave it back in spades. There was always a
test of wills between Mun and Tim. One day she said, “I’ve had it,” and she shipped him off to Culver Military Academy in Indiana. He didn’t like that at all, so he and a friend plotted and strategized for a long time, and they planned the perfect getaway. They ran off and split up because they were worried about being caught. Tim knew that his mother would have the Pinkerton detectives after him, and she did. They spent months trying to find him, and he stayed one step ahead of them. He worked at a fox farm for a while, stayed at the Salvation Army, hitchhiked around. After months, he finally came home, and she was furious, because she had been worried sick about him all those months out on the road. Nobody knew where he was, not even the Pinkertons. He knew exactly how to get her goat.
She ran the show, though, and she let you know she was in charge. She had a bell and a specific number of rings for each child, based on birth order. All except for Dickie Dell, who didn’t have a ring. If the bell only rang once, that would be for Larry, two bells was Bill, three was Pat, four was Tim. Tim said that when the bell started ringing, the kids would freeze and wait and see how many bells there were. Depending on how many, that child would go to see her. She didn’t know what to do to get these kids under control. You have to remember when she was born, so maybe they did things like that in those days. I don’t think Mun could ever say no to Dickie, basically, although she was pretty tough on her, too. She was tough on all of them.
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CAROLE WELLS DOHENY: Dickie Dell and Shirley Temple were friends growing up, and Shirley Temple’s mother built her a dollhouse that was the size of a regular house. One of my husband’s cousins actually ended up buying it. It’s up off of Rockingham up above Sunset. And because Shirley Temple had one, Dickie wanted one, too. It was built on the Greystone property, a three-quarter-size house. Everything, the kitchen and the bathrooms, were all three-quarters size.
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ANN SMITH BLACK: The dollhouse of Dickie Dell was just wonderful. We couldn’t play in it unless we were invited, and we weren’t invited very often. You could look, but not touch. Everything was in miniature, and it was all done beautifully, decorated with silk bedspreads and silver crystal. It really was quite a thing, a dream, kind of a Hansel and Gretel house, with a swooping roof. You could stand up in it, even if you were a grown-up.
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TOPSY DOHENY: Dickie Dell’s dollhouse was really a small house, not some little thing. I remember Tim saying he once put a cherry bomb in the dollhouse, and when he didn’t hear it go off, he telephoned Dickie in the dollhouse to ask if it had blown up yet. It was a huge place.
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CAROLE WELLS DOHENY: Dickie Dell was not a beauty, but she was stunning in her way. She had dark, short hair, and she had the Doheny nose, which is a little protruding, but she had a very kind face. Her first husband was a lawyer—Niven was his name—and he was the “proper” person to marry. He was as boring as a white tablecloth. He was also chintzy. For Christmas, he gave her a refrigerator. This is a woman who could buy and sell him eighteen thousand times, and he gave her a refrigerator. She said, “Why doesn’t he go out and buy something fabulous for me?” They just weren’t good together. Her second husband, Porter Washington, was a dog trainer and breeder, like her, of keeshonds. He was great-looking—Texan or Oklahoman, part Cherokee Indian—and sexy, especially compared to her first husband, that lawyer prude. He must have banged her a few times in the dog kennels, and he was dashing, fun; why wouldn’t she marry him? Sweetheart didn’t talk to her for ten years, she was so appalled. She even took Dickie to Europe to get her away from him, but it didn’t work. He turned out to be a wonderful husband to her.
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LARRY NIVEN: Sweetheart never warmed up to my stepfather, but then again Mom married her dog handler, so come on!
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TOPSY DOHENY: Dickie was a very gentle soul, very gentle. I never saw her get mean; she just wanted to laugh and be happy. She didn’t have a mean bone in her. Her nickname came about because her brother Larry couldn’t say her real name, Lucy Estelle, a bit of a tongue twister. It came out “Dickie Dell,” which just stuck. She had two passions in her life: dogs and jewelry, pretty stones. She’d wear them on any occasion, to go to the doctor’s office or to the store, and Tim was always terrified that she’d be mugged.
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CAROLE WELLS DOHENY: She once gave me an eighteen-carat faceted pink sapphire. It had two rows of diamonds, maybe a quarter to a third carat each, a huge ring. That was for having my first son. She was very thoughtful. She used to telephone Ruser jewelers on Rodeo Drive and have someone come over if a family member or friend was having a birthday or special occasion. She would call and say, “Bring a few things because my daughter-in-law is having a birthday” or “Christmas is coming,” and they’d bring trays of stuff.
She had a house at Hermosa Beach, and we would go there in the summers. Her lunches were like Thanksgiving. The waiters wore white gloves and served things like beef Wellington with all the trimmings or coq au vin. At the beach, for lunch! Everything was fabulous, like you were at the best restaurant. She would come down in an emerald-green bathing suit and have on her emerald earrings and emerald necklace. Her rings. Her bracelets, a pin. She would wear all of her jewelry even if she was just in her swimsuit. She never went swimming; she would just sit around with her girlfriends. But it was gorgeous, and a great example. If she had a red outfit on she’d wear all her rubies, and if she wore blue, she’d have her sapphires and diamonds on. I loved it, because where else should she wear them? Summertime at the beach, why not? Over the swimsuit, she would wear those little jackets and coat tops that you could see through. They would end at her shorts. It was summertime and she had great legs. She’d sit out on the patio and watch all of us swim, have all her jewels on with her friends over and have cocktails. It was a big drinking group. By noon everyone was getting happy.
Even Groucho Marx was enchanted by her. They met on board a ship to London when her mother was taking her to Europe, trying to distract her from marrying Porter Washington, the dog handler. Groucho was on the ship. He had the best time with her, saying she had such a great sense of humor. He admired her. He was a big celebrity, but he thought she was the cat’s meow. So when he and I did a show together years later, I introduced him to my husband, and Groucho said, “Doheny, Doheny, are you Dickie Dell’s relative?” My husband answered, “She’s my godmother and my aunt,” and Groucho regaled us with stories.
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LARRY NIVEN: At one point a burglar got away with a fortune in jewels—two fortunes, really—from my mother. He came in through her library window and got stuck in the racks of dog-show ribbons that blocked the window. All the dogs began barking at him, but the servants paid no attention because the dogs were always barking. He finally got through the window and took off with two pillowcases full of jewels. He threw one of them in a garbage can so as not to have to carry it any further, and kept going. He wound up in a bar trying to sell them, and that’s how he got caught. He was badly dismayed when he was told how much he had stolen and lost. It was hundreds of thousands of dollars. We got some of it back from the bartender, but not everything was retrieved.
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PATRICK “NED” DOHENY: My great-grandfather felt particularly beholden to the well-being and the safety of his family. I’ve read letters of his that are so sweet and have a level of sentimentality in them that takes you aback, especially when you think that he was as tough as he had to have been to do all that he did. All of his references to his family are almost cloying, they’re so devoted and unabashedly loving. So when he wanted to do something grand for his only child, Ned, he underwrote the building of Greystone. He wanted to be magnanimous.
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RICHARD RAYNER: You look at Greystone and you understand that this is what power and money can do. Raymond Chandler mythologizes it in Farewell, My Lovely: “The house itself was not so much. It was smaller than Buckingham Palace, rather gray for California, and probably ha
d fewer windows than the Chrysler Building.” It’s mightily impressive today, and it would have been even more impressive back then—and so inappropriate, in terms of L.A. architecture. An English country mansion, with stone this thick on a hill in Beverly Hills? It would’ve been like a movie set even back then.
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WALLACE NEFF, JR.: The Dohenys were my father’s biggest client; they had him design nearly everything they built. He built them a huge home in Ojai, California, and he also designed for Mrs. Doheny the library at St. John’s Seminary in Camarillo. But he didn’t do Greystone. When Ned Doheny got married and had all these children, he and his wife decided that my father should design a home for them. Ned Doheny told my father that he wanted it to look like a palace. That’s the way young Doheny thought. He was sort of grand, wanted a big thing to show off. So some designs were made, but then his wife wanted more of an English house, and I can understand that. A palace is a bit much for a young lady. So she contacted Gordon Kaufmann, and “poof” went my father’s design.
