by Jean Stein
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MIKE DAVIS: Like everything around the Dohenys, Greystone is a mausoleum: a Gothic, granite/limestone mausoleum. Everything about the family has a sepulcher- or tomb-like quality to it. But maybe that’s characteristic of these money houses. The builders of the great houses set standards for each other; it was an arms race. And Hearst’s San Simeon won.
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TOPSY DOHENY: Tim told me that the property had its own water. Seven spring caves were dug out, and the water from them was pumped into reservoirs. The work was done by old prospector friends of his grandfather. Pa D. had a lot of old cronies from the old days whom he hired to go into the caves with picks and shovels, dig them out and shore them up so that the water could be caught.
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PATRICK “NED” DOHENY: We used to play in the bowling alley a lot when we were kids. It was big fun, that bowling alley. And it was a house you could explore endlessly, a great thing for a kid. But it was a scary place; I mean, it’s a big house. My father used to say that he would walk down the halls at night and his brothers would leap out of the curtains to scare white hair into his temples.
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TOPSY DOHENY: There were all kinds of people coming and going at Greystone. Mun’s father, Pop Smith, loved football, and she used to have the whole USC football team over there. She was also friends with Somerset Maugham, who Tim said once stayed at the house for a few days, and with Auden. There were a lot of people passing through.
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JEAN STEIN: I visited Greystone a few times with my parents for tea. It was all very grand, and I was cautioned to be on my best behavior. It was the kind of place where one could never feel comfortable. Like in a museum, one false move and the guards would come after you.
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STEFANIA PIGNATELLI WERNER: When I was a girl, I knew Estelle Doheny very well, as this old lady in my life. She wasn’t much fun, but Mother liked her, and who didn’t like my mother? And I suspect Estelle was very taken with the fact that my mother was a descendant of two Spanish land-grant families, the Sepulveda family on her father’s side and the de la Guerras on her mother’s. We would go over and see Estelle a lot. She had an unbelievable house on Chester Place, with a swimming pool in a greenhouse that was phenomenal. It was long and beautiful, and nobody ever used it, so she let me swim in it.
She looked like somebody’s cook, but she was extraordinary. When it came time for me to marry, she wanted me to get married at St. Vincent’s, this huge Catholic church that they had built. They didn’t build a church, they built a cathedral! I got married there, and that morning she sent her Packard for me, filled with lilies of the valley. It was unbelievable, so beautiful I cannot tell you. She even changed the red carpeting in the church to a soft blue color, all the way from the front door to the altar, added to match the pale blue color of the ridiculous bridesmaids’ dresses. And in the corner of the church stood a statue of old man Doheny’s patron saint sculpted to resemble Doheny himself.
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TOM SITTON: The Dohenys were pillars of L.A. society at the time, except that they were Catholics and Democrats, two things that the rest of the elite of L.A. were not. But they still got along well enough because they were so rich. They were giving a lot of money to the Catholic Church. In 1923, he paid to build St. Vincent de Paul Church, which people used to call “Doheny’s Fire Escape.” The bishop told him that while everybody sins, rich people sin a lot more than poor people do, so he needed to give a lot of money. So the church was his “fire escape” to keep him from going to hell.
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PATRICK “NED” DOHENY: The family was really very, very rich. Not just in the financial sense, but also in the sense of great personalities. We want people to be archetypal, to be larger than life, to live up to our expectations. We expect people to inhabit a certain space fully, for us, whether or not it’s the truth. That is the case with history’s judgment on my great-grandfather, although he always felt that he was a patriot.
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LARRY NIVEN: The Teapot Dome period was a nightmare, I gather, though the family didn’t talk about it. They definitely didn’t talk about the scandal to the kids. But Mom always felt that my great-grandfather had done no wrong.
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RICHARD RAYNER: As early as the beginning of World War I, Doheny began to advise the U.S. government about how to ensure the naval oil supply. In the first years of the twentieth century, control of certain oil-rich lands in Wyoming and California had been given to the Department of the Navy as an oil reserve, since naval vessels had recently been converted to run on oil rather than coal. By the outbreak of the Great War, Doheny had begun talking to the government about building a base in Hawaii, with tanks to hold oil. Hovering around all this was the question of what to do with this oil-rich land controlled by the navy. Who was going to exploit it? Doheny then held out the threat of drainage, the nightmare that if you leave the oil in the ground, ruthless people are going to buy the land next to it and suck the oil out. Paul Thomas Anderson obviously picked up on this for There Will Be Blood. So Doheny presented a case for friendly people like himself to be given the job of getting the oil out on the navy’s behalf. When Harding was elected in 1920, low and behold, Doheny’s old poker playing partner, Albert Fall, from their harum-scarum days in New Mexico in the 1880s, was appointed secretary of the interior. Shortly thereafter—presumably at Doheny’s behest, but certainly in Doheny’s interest—control of these two oil naval reserves, Elk Hills and Teapot Dome, passed from the secretary of the navy to the secretary of the interior, i.e., to Albert Fall. The right to exploit these oil leases was then given to two of the most powerful oil men in the country: Harry Sinclair, who received Teapot Dome in Wyoming, and Edward Doheny landed Elk Hills in California.
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PATRICK “NED” DOHENY: I don’t know who did what with respect to Teapot Dome. My great-grandfather had a lot of integrity, but every era has its own zeitgeist, its own personality. Whether it’s socially acceptable levels of racism or chauvinism, or a tolerance for kinds of deviant behavior, or a cavalier disregard for rules—each era is marked by its own set of circumstances. And you can’t have a historical perspective if you look back at the past with the values of the contemporary era. But the consensus view within the family, at least, is that the bid my great-grandfather made and the deal he struck with the government for the oil storage depots in Pearl Harbor was, in fact, the lowest bid.
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RICHARD RAYNER: Eventually it came out that Harry Sinclair had plied Fall with gifts and that Doheny himself in 1921 had sent his son, Ned, along with Ned’s friend-secretary-chauffeur, Hugh Plunkett, to New York, where they withdrew a hundred thousand dollars in cash from Ned’s bank account and then traveled down by train to Washington, where they handed over the money in a black leather satchel to Albert Fall in a Washington hotel. All of this was exposed later in an excruciating series of hearings, investigations, and eventually court trials.
The unraveling began when Albert Fall, strapped for cash and the owner of the Three Rivers Ranch in New Mexico that he was desperate to expand, was seen in 1922, 1923 spending money ostentatiously. His enemies in New Mexico started poking around and brought it to the attention of Senator Thomas Walsh of Montana. An Inspector Javert figure, Walsh called Doheny and Fall to appear before a Senate committee in late 1923 to account for the money and the leases. During the hearings, both denied that anything improper had occurred, although Fall admitted that he had granted the leases without competitive bids, and Doheny could not resist boasting about the size of the deal, saying it would be “bad luck if we do not get one hundred million dollars profit.”
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ANN SMITH BLACK: Pa D. created pipelines in Hawaii to receive oil from various places, as well as a shipping process for it, and when World War II started, they used those pipelines to keep our navy going. My father always said, “Don’t forget that. He may have been involved in a scandal and all, but nevertheless the thin
gs that he created, like the pipelines in Hawaii, were of great benefit to the United States.”
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RICHARD RAYNER: When the first round of hearings ended with no revelation about where Fall received his money, Fall and Doheny concocted a plan to make a patsy of Ned McLean, the millionaire socialite and playboy owner of The Washington Post and The Cincinnati Enquirer who traveled around in a private railway car named the Enquirer and gave baubles like the Hope Diamond to his flamboyant wife, Evalyn Walsh McLean. It’s hard not to see McLean as another rich boy who ended up strangled by his silver spoon. His father created a great newspaper in Cincinnati, bought The Washington Post, turned it into a great paper, and amassed a fortune, leaving it to his only child, who, like young Ned Doheny, was not the man his father was. Yet because Ned McLean had played poker and bridge with Fall in smoke-filled rooms with President Harding, he went along with Fall and Doheny’s strategy to say that he had loaned Fall the money. It was easy to pin it all on Ned. It was a stupid and failed cover-up that Walsh saw through quickly.
In early 1924, only a few months after Harding’s sudden death in August of the previous year, Doheny took the witness chair twice more, determined to protect his oil company, his family, his position, his money. He testified that while he did indeed give his dear old friend Albert Fall the money, one hundred thousand dollars was to him a mere bagatelle, no more than twenty-five or fifty dollars to the ordinary individual, he said. Doheny presented himself as an irresponsible old-time miner who happened to strike oil. His hope was to get out of this without being prosecuted criminally.
Credit 1.5
Former secretary of the interior Albert B. Fall and his wife at the opening of his trial.
Doheny tried every possible angle. In 1925 he even approached Cecil B. DeMille, then the most famous movie director in America, and asked him to film his biography. He expected DeMille to shoot what was essentially a PR film to make him look glamorous and exciting and patriotic. I’m sure that he thought he was a worthy subject for a feature film by DeMille, but he also believed it could be a useful tool in his pesky fight against the government. DeMille was not tempted, merely rather amused by the idea.
The attempt to avoid criminal prosecution failed, and the first trial for conspiracy began in late 1925, just a few months after Doheny sold his holdings in Mexico to Standard Oil. He’d clearly been thinking about how to protect his fortune and leave his family well provided for in the future. But as the first trial started, he was under tremendous pressure from stockholders who did not believe that they had gotten fair value for their shares. So in addition to criminal proceedings for conspiracy, there was a wave of other lawsuits, and he knew he’d have to spend untold millions on his legal defense. Meanwhile, just before the criminal trial, he wrote a letter to Fall in which he mentioned that Ned Doheny had spent the summer at the Mayo Clinic. You get the sense that everything was proving too much for his son; nevertheless, Ned was called to stand in the trial, testifying to his service during the war and his activity as the messenger carrying one hundred thousand dollars from his father to Fall. When asked why he would send his only son on such a journey, Doheny blithely replied, “I sent my most trusted agent, whom I was endeavoring at that time to work into every phase of the business.” What’s more astonishing is that Doheny went on to say that even if Ned “had been held up on the way he would have learned something in experience.” The implication was that it would have made him more of a man. Of course, Doheny must have believed that Ned’s Sancho Panza, Hugh Plunkett, would have protected him on the journey.
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PATRICK “NED” DOHENY: Under the circumstances, Pa D.’s son was the only person he felt he could totally trust. My great-grandfather was very particular toward family. I remember one letter in particular that he wrote when he was in London on a war footing for World War I. The windows were blacked out, and the headlights on cars were reduced to really small squares of light, and there was a lot of military in the streets. And his overwhelming concern was how much he missed his family, and how much he cared about them. The well-being of his family was his first priority. Your family becomes that one resource that is undeniably connected to you, when everything else is uncertain at best.
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GAYLE CHELGREN: My uncle’s full name was Theodore Hugh Plunkett, but my mother, Isabelle, called him Hughie. I never knew him because he was born in 1896 and died in the late twenties. But my mother idolized him. The Plunketts comprised my mother and her brothers, Hugh, Charles, and Robert. She was the closest to Hugh. He was always kind to her, and she’d tell me about how he’d get a new car and come pick her up first thing to take her for a ride in it. She loved him a lot, and she must have been special to him, too.
I was told that Hugh worked at a gas station as a mechanic and that that’s where he met Ned Doheny. I think Ned also worked at the station, although maybe Hugh just worked on his car and that’s how they met. Hugh became his chauffeur, then his secretary, and then his best friend. I don’t know for sure, but they may have both been gay.
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LARRY NIVEN: Every Doheny kid worked as a gas station attendant. Every Doheny male. I don’t know whether that’s still true or not, but the idea was to give them an idea of what it’s like to work. You’re not a complete male until you’ve done that, that’s the way people thought—and still do think, I believe. For my brother the gas station was in Beverly Hills, somewhere east of Rodeo. I worked at a gas station in Topeka, Kansas, when I was studying mathematics at Washburn University. And my father worked at a gas station, after he married my mother, and he wasn’t even a Doheny—he was a Niven. He once talked about it, saying it was a dumb idea and that spending that many hours cleaning up under dripping cars was just not worth his while. So he became a lawyer. My family had their doubts about me. I was slow getting any kind of a career before I became a writer, so my grandmother Lucy Doheny’s second husband, Leigh Battson, had the idea to buy me a gas station and let me run it. He certainly had the money. For that matter, I probably had the money. And running a gas station has got to be easy, right? For a scatterbrain like me, who daydreamed as a kid about flying Wernher von Braun’s imaginary vehicles—the winged craft that was supposed to land on Mars. I was always a rabid science fiction fan, but Leigh Battson didn’t see that as an ambition. His offer was well meant, but I turned him down.
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PATRICK “NED” DOHENY: Supposedly Ned Doheny met Hugh Plunkett when Ned was working at a gas station, but there are all kinds of wild rumors. One was that Ned was gay. I don’t know. Among the ranks of the family it’s held to be a spurious idea. I suspect it arose from all the time that Ned spent alone, away from his family. I can’t be any more specific than that. I mean, my hands are completely tied.
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JOHN CREEL: My mother divorced my father, Henry Creel. Then she married my stepfather, Robert Plunkett. He was born in Fort Scott, Kansas, and from there the family moved to Los Angeles. His brother Hugh was the oldest of the family: there was Hugh, Chick—which stood for Charles—Robert, and Isabelle. My stepfather said that Hugh was the best, a good person who helped people. Everybody loved him. And if Hugh was anything like my stepfather or his sister, Isabelle, he was also very charismatic.
Hugh was good with his hands, and he worked repairing cars. I don’t know if he met Ned Doheny in that process, but they became good friends. Hugh worked for Ned for a long time, and he did well, even sending my stepfather to USC to study engineering. He was supporting the family, so it was really dramatic for them when everything happened.
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RICHARD RAYNER: When a second criminal trial for bribery began to loom on the horizon for Doheny and Fall in 1929, the pressure on all parties reached a breaking point. Both men had been acquitted of the conspiracy charges in December 1926, and they must have hoped that after Harding’s death the Coolidge administration would say, “That’s it. We’ve spent all this money already, enough is enough.” But
it was not to be. Plunkett was going to have to testify at the trial, and he didn’t have immunity, whereas Ned did from one of the previous trials. This was the first time that the prosecutors had required Plunkett to testify, and he was probably cracking up a bit.
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JOHN CREEL: Hugh’s former wife later testified that although Hugh was very upset during this period, he certainly wasn’t crazy. According to my stepfather, if anyone was disturbed, it was Ned. He was a very unstable person.
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LARRY NIVEN: My grandfather and his friend wound up dead. I think there was a fight; the friend may have been something of a parasite, but I don’t know. There was probably some meddling with the evidence, too, so the full story of how it happened is lost in the past. They didn’t talk about that with the kids at all.
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TOPSY DOHENY: My husband, Tim, was only three when his father died, so he had only two memories of his father: once when his father pulled him out of the surf at Hermosa Beach and kept him from drowning, and once carrying him in Greystone to the indoor balcony overlooking the living room where a party was under way. That’s it. And in the old days, they discussed the death as little as possible. Any question was quickly discouraged. But once I asked Tim, “What do you think happened?” and he told me his father’s secretary had mental problems and finally Ned said to him, “Look, Hugh, you’re going to have to go away for a while.” They didn’t have any real medicines for such things in those days, and I imagine the places where one got sent were not the nicest. So Hugh got very upset, pulled out a gun, shot Tim’s father, and then shot himself.
Tim’s middle name was Hugh—Timothy Hugh Doheny—and after that incident, of course, his name was changed. Timothy Michael it became. So Hugh had been close to the family. My understanding is that Mun, Tim’s mother, was in the house at the time. I don’t know if Tim was there or not, but if so he was probably upstairs with the nurse or something. It was in the papers, of course, not that you’d get the right story. They were afraid of scandal, so apparently the doctor came first, before it was reported to the police, and then the doctor didn’t report everything to the police. In those days families were very low on publicity.
