by Nancie Clare
The dispute over expanding the school had occurred before Beverly Hills incorporated as a city. However, Spalding and his fellow trustees hadn’t forgotten the city government’s first legal interaction with Los Angeles, which in turn was also its first internal conflict with the Rodeo Land and Water Company. On April 25, 1914, about three months after the city’s incorporation papers had been signed in Sacramento, Los Angeles, with a right-of-way purchased from the Rodeo Land and Water Company before the city’s incorporation, began laying a water pipe across Coldwater Canyon within the boundaries of Beverly Hills without obtaining permission from the city to do so. In an illuminating discussion of the early history of Beverly Hills that took place in April 1946 among some of the city’s early movers and shakers—including Ivan Traucht; Raymond Page; Arthur Pillsbury, who had been Beverly Hills’ first city engineer; Stanley Anderson of the Beverly Hills Hotel; and Claude Kimball—the men discussed some of the shenanigans that took place before the decision to bring the idea of annexation to Los Angeles to a vote.4 According to Pillsbury, Los Angeles didn’t get the pipeline across the city’s land without a fight that included Pillsbury and friends approaching the location of the pipeline and taking an armed stance.5 Cooler heads eventually prevailed and restraining orders and injunctions were filed by Beverly Hills city trustees against Los Angeles. The Rodeo Land and Water Company, which had sold the right-of-way to Los Angeles before the city had incorporated, entered the fray by bringing pressure on the Beverly Hills trustees to cooperate, and the first friction between it and the Beverly Hills city government arose. The Beverly Hills trustees responded, “The government of the City of Beverly Hills has been vested in a board of trustees separate and distinct from your company, over which we do not believe you have any right, legally or morally, or exercise control.”6
The case went to court and, in spite of what Beverly Hills’ attorneys felt was black letter state law, Superior Court Judge Louis R. Works found in favor of Los Angeles. The larger city, Judge Works reasoned, had the greater need. What wasn’t said, but could certainly be inferred, was that the larger city had the greater political muscle. Beverly Hills would have to endure water owned by the City of Los Angeles rushing through its jurisdiction without the benefit of receiving a single drop. The only comfort that Arthur Pillsbury took from doing his best to prevent the pipeline going across the land was the satisfaction of holding up the process and, according to Pillsbury, raising William Mulholland’s ire when Pillsbury took the stand in court.7
(Arthur Pillsbury and William Mulholland may have clashed in court over the pipeline case in 1914, but the two men had been on good terms previously. When Pillsbury ran into what he thought were potentially catastrophic difficulties building one of Beverly Hills’ first reservoirs in Coldwater Canyon, which collected water from the canyon’s artesian spring, he consulted with Mulholland. The water was seeping out of the reservoir he was building faster than it was flowing in and Pillsbury thought he was going to have to go back to the Rodeo Land and Water Company to ask for more money to rebuild. Mulholland provided him with a simple solution, suggesting Pillsbury go down to the brickyard in Santa Monica and get some clay, dry it out, and then let the dried clay sink down into the structure and seal the cracks. As of 1946 when Pillsbury was telling the story, the reservoir had held and was still in use.)
Spalding especially—even though he was the second-largest stockholder in the Rodeo Land and Water Company through his wife—was convinced that keeping Beverly Hills a separate city would pay huge dividends in the future by delivering to its citizens more bang for their tax dollars. Not to mention retaining control over the land use and the schools. The city’s Board of Trustees had to look no further than Hollywood to see how an independent city could be absorbed into the larger metropolis with little regard for any promises Los Angeles might make. And according to the statute that outlined the procedure for annexation, any city that wished to join Los Angeles went into the marriage without knowing how large of a burden the outstanding bonds it was responsible for would be. At the time of the proposed annexation, Los Angeles had more than $80 million in outstanding bond debt, a sum that translates into $1.5 billion 2017 dollars.
The battle over annexation between the city trustees and the Rodeo Land and Water Company raged on more or less in public, but there was also plenty of subterfuge and secret backroom dealings going on behind the scenes.
Those determined, not to mention prominent, Beverly Hills residents who gathered in 1946 to reminisce about the early days of Beverly Hills were opposed to what the Rodeo Land and Water Company was attempting to do before Mary Pickford and her team of fellow silent screen stars were on board for the fight. The question was, would they have enough influence to prevail without the help of the stars? Considering other cities and unincorporated areas that had agreed to annexation before and after Beverly Hills’ 1923 vote—including Hollywood in 1910 and Venice in 1925—the glaring difference in the case of Beverly Hills was the celebrity campaign against joining the larger city. (Although, to be fair, Venice also voted against annexation in its first vote on the matter in 1923. Venice’s city trustees continued the drumbeat for annexation with subsequent votes until they got the result they wanted.)
During that April 1946 meeting, Stanley Anderson recalled having recently lunched at the Brown Derby restaurant and run into William Joyce, at whose home the anti-annexationists had gathered in early 1923. While the two were reminiscing, Joyce reminded Anderson that at a dinner Joyce had hosted, the group had raised $52,000 to fight the Rodeo Land and Water Company’s bid to join Los Angeles. The anti-annexation group was under considerable pressure, Joyce reminded Anderson. After hearing about Joyce’s anti-annexation gathering, Burton Green had one of the Rodeo Land and Water Company’s employees, Harrison Lewis, go to Joyce’s house to persuade him to abandon the anti-annexationists and join the pro-annexation camp. Joyce, thinking on his feet, realized he should have a witness to what was going to be said, deflected the visit, and insisted that Lewis come back the following evening. The anti-annexation group needed reinforcements to combat what they had come to feel were underhanded and dubious dealings that the Rodeo Land and Water Company was engaged in. They needed a big gun: The anti-annexation camp needed someone like the universally respected Silsby Spalding, who as a Beverly Hills trustee as well as an heir to the Canfield estate’s considerable holdings in Rodeo Land and Water, a position that was second only to Burton Green, gave him a foot in both camps. It was Silsby Spalding whom Joyce invited to listen to the pitch from the pro-annexation camp. While Harrison Lewis was bending William Joyce’s ear about the reasons Beverly Hills would be better off joining the larger city, Silsby Spalding was listening and doing a slow burn in the next room. A previous incident during a meeting at the Rodeo School, where Spalding was booed by employees of Rodeo Land and Water Company, had made him mad enough to make a late-night stop at Stanley Anderson’s house, wake Anderson up, and declare about the anti-annexation effort, “I am with you in this. I will put money into it.” Between his reception at the Rodeo School and whatever it was Spalding heard Lewis, the Rodeo Land and Water Company man, say to William Joyce, Spalding had become stoutly anti-annexation. And it was an opinion Spalding freely shared with his fellow Beverly Hills City trustees. Firminger writes of a trustee meeting open to the public. Spalding asked those in the audience to step outside while the trustees went into executive session. Those who had exited the building couldn’t hear what was being said, but they could see through the uncurtained windows that Sil Spalding’s fist hit the table and “that he spoke with considerable emphasis.”8
Leaning on prominent anti-annexation residents wasn’t the entirety of the Rodeo Land and Water Company’s duplicity, though. At this 1946 meeting, Stanley Anderson described how he discovered that the purported need for annexation to Los Angeles to ensure a ready supply of water was baseless. As someone who was anti-annexation, Anderson had met with J. B. Lippincott, one of the re
gion’s best-known hydraulic engineers, to see if there was potentially more water to be pumped in Beverly Hills. According to Anderson’s account, when he arrived at the engineer’s office, Lippincott was in a meeting, but offered to let Anderson see the file on the project. That’s when Anderson discovered evidence that Lippincott’s hydraulic engineering services had already been secured by the Rodeo Land and Water Company and a report had been written and delivered to Burton Green. The file was a revelation to Anderson, to say the least. What he found out was that a year before proposing annexation, Burton Green had received a report from Lippincott indicating that “they could develop enough water for 30,000 people.”9 Anderson surreptitiously pocketed a copy of Lippincott’s letter to Burton Green, proof that Green knew well and good, and had known for as long as a year, that more water could be obtained for Beverly Hills without annexation to Los Angeles. Anderson showed the letter to Spalding as proof that while it may have been in the best interests of Rodeo Land and Water Company for Beverly Hills to annex itself to Los Angeles, it wasn’t necessarily in the best interest of the city. Rodeo Land and Water wasn’t telling the city the whole story.
In the autumn of 1922, while the plans for transferring the city’s water utility company were before the State Railroad Commission in Sacramento, because the Rodeo Land and Water Company had refused to transfer the utility company it had set up to provide services to the City of Beverly Hills without compensation, the question of where Beverly Hills would acquire additional water was heating up back home. At a meeting held by the Beverly Hills Civic Club, attorney Force Parker, who had been hired by the trustees of the City of Beverly Hills, read a report outlining three solutions to the impending water crisis. Parker’s report favored the acquisition of twelve wells from the Hollywood Union Water Company for a cost of about $350,000. According to the report, the wells would provide enough water to supply a city of 250,000. For a bond measure of $500,000, Parker stated, “Beverly Hills could own its own water supply, have fire protection and enough water left over to sell, if desired.”10 The other two solutions included compelling the Rodeo Land and Water Company to expand its wells and reduce its rates, or annexation to Los Angeles. The attendees of this particular meeting were firmly in the camp of keeping Beverly Hills independent, but stopped short of formally adopting the idea that the city should obtain its own municipal water system. Action was postponed until after the State Railroad Commission ruled on the case of the transfer of the Rodeo Land and Water Company’s utility company to the City of Beverly Hills that was currently before it.11
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To be fair to the Rodeo Land and Water Company and its water utility, though, it’s also safe to say that they had no idea just how over the top the homes in the city’s near future were going to be. But with William Mulholland’s monumental aqueduct project recently completed at the time Beverly Hills incorporated (it was completed and water began to flow in November 1913), it’s quite possible that the principals of the Rodeo Land and Water Company thought they saw a way out of the almost certain water shortage whether it came sooner or later. All through 1913, some of the region’s smaller cities were holding out hope that the water flowing down to Los Angeles would be available to them. Other municipalities, from Long Beach and Santa Monica to the south and west, and Pasadena and Glendora to the north and east, had expressed interest in buying the “extra” water, as if there could be such a thing,12 and having Los Angeles figure out a way to deliver it. Mulholland wasn’t necessarily opposed to selling water, but he didn’t think that building water supply infrastructure for other municipalities was the responsibility of the City of Los Angeles. In Mulholland’s opinion, “If a community wanted to be part of the [City of Los Angeles] water system, the solution was simple … become part of the city, pay city taxes and enjoy city services.”13 However, the cities like Beverly Hills that were looking for water from the Owens Valley weren’t keen on being absorbed into Los Angeles for a variety of reasons that included control of their schools and land-use issues. As for getting into the business of negotiating contracts with other cities and selling water, Mulholland, a civil servant who had no personal financial stake in what was, after all, a municipal water department that was owned by the City of Los Angeles, was at best ambivalent. He was “more interested in seeing [Los Angeles] grow than he was in getting into the water sales business.”14
Not everyone in L.A.’s Department of Water and Power felt the same way. S. C. Graham, the new DWP water commissioner, proposed a project dubbed the “high line” that would be a water delivery system to the San Gabriel Valley to the east, for which Los Angeles would charge a premium on the water to recoup the cost of building the conduit. Not only did the idea of delivering water to the entire region not sit well with Mulholland, it violated the City of Los Angeles Charter. An election was held to amend the charter and it passed by a significant margin. Pasadena and Los Angeles began negotiating for the high line to bring water east. Not so fast, said the Los Angeles city attorneys. They determined that, legally, the cities that would be receiving water could not pay for the building of the high line; money would have to come from a bond issue in Los Angeles, which would have to be authorized by a special election. Mulholland took a definite stand against the plan. He was adamant that since it was the City of Los Angeles that had made the huge financial commitment to provide itself with water, the water was for use by the citizens of Los Angeles, not to be the product for a water sale and delivery business, whether it was to the west end of the San Fernando Valley or via the high line to Pasadena. “The city should not pay for either of them,” he said.15 The bond issue failed. There would be no high line to bring water to Pasadena, or any other nearby city for that matter.
Just to the west of Los Angeles, as citizens in Beverly Hills contemplated incorporating into an independent city, Burton Green and the other principals of the Rodeo Land and Water Company must have been closely watching the negotiations for the so-called Graham Proposal—the high line’s official name—between Los Angeles and San Gabriel Valley cities such as Pasadena and Glendora. It had to have crossed their minds that, quite possibly, this type of approach—contracting to receive Owens Valley water from Los Angeles—could be an economical answer to the water shortage that was sure to come. The machinations were many and complicated, but this Owens Valley water project the City of Los Angeles had undertaken was still a work in progress in all of its permutations. Bringing water to Pasadena and other San Gabriel Valley cities might be a nonstarter because the bond issue to build the high line was voted down, but things could change. For one thing, Mulholland wouldn’t be the chief of the Los Angeles waterworks forever; for another, City of Los Angeles water was already flowing through the City of Beverly Hills. And even though Beverly Hills may have lost the case against Los Angeles in court over the pipeline running through its city limits, laws could be changed and litigation revisited.
While they may have known the limitations of the city’s water supply, the Rodeo Land and Water Company and its offshoot, the Beverly Hills Utility Company, must have felt they were in a position to bide their time during the city’s earliest days when growth was slow. Just how slow? According to Pierce Benedict’s 1934 History of Beverly Hills, in the city’s early days lima beans were still king and, since the harvesting was done haphazardly, right after threshing the stalks for the crop, Beverly Hills was a prime picnicking destination for Los Angelenos who wanted to pick their own beans and “return home with a year’s supply.”16 This existence was bucolic. Between the luxurious Beverly Hills Hotel and quotidian lima bean fields, in the area just south of the hotel in what is now Will Rogers Park, where Beverly and Canon Drives and Sunset Boulevard converge, weekly baseball games were played. There, the hometown team, the Bean Eaters, whose members included Ed Spence, Pierce Benedict, George McBride, and Rodeo Land and Water Company manager Charles Anderson (no relation to the Andersons of the Beverly Hills Hotel), frequently squared off against the Malted-H
oppers from Maier’s Brewery in Los Angeles. Public transportation in that time before automobile ownership was common consisted of a “ramshackle Ford driven by a venerable Jew”17 that ran between the trolley stop and the Beverly Hills Hotel. Eventually the trolley line (one of Henry Huntington’s Dinky lines) would continue west along Sunset Boulevard as far as what would become Whittier Drive on Beverly Hills’ western edge, with a stop at the Beverly Hills Hotel. By the mid-1920s, the trolley would be no more. The land that had been under the tracks, however, would become one of the most coveted bridle paths in the world.
Before World War One there was a single building in the business district: a combination grocery store, butcher shop, and post office. During World War One a group of Beverly Hills citizens, a mixture of moving picture talent such as Fred Niblo and Charles Ray and local businessmen such as Jake Dansinger, E. E. Spence, Kirk Johnson, William Hunnewell, and Norman Pabst, formed a company and established a community store. It wasn’t until just before Christmas of 1920 that Frank Homer opened the town’s first drugstore, the eponymous Homer’s, which would quickly attain legendary status because of the soon-to-be-hometown celebs who would shop there.
The water pressure, as it were, started to build after the end of World War One and picked up considerably in 1920, the year Mary Pickford and Doug Fairbanks officially took up residence at Pickfair. Mary and Doug weren’t the first wealthy people to set up house in the new city; Harry and Virginia Robinson of J.W. Robinson’s Department Store, Silsby Spalding, and King Gillette, the razor magnate, preceded them. And they weren’t the first movie people, either; Charles Ray and Corinne Griffith (who would eventually spearhead the effort to erect the memorial sculpture honoring those who fought annexation at the intersection of South Beverly Drive and Olympic Boulevard) were there first. But Mary and Doug were the biggest. While Mary and Doug would always be the queen and king of the community, the influx of motion picture royalty either moving into existing homes or buying land to build in Beverly Hills picked up considerably after 1920. Charlie Chaplin was one of the first, wanting to live near his best friend Doug Fairbanks no doubt. He was followed in rapid succession by Will Rogers; Fred Thomson and his wife Frances Marion, who was a scenarist and one of Mary Pickford’s closet friends; Theda Bara; Gloria Swanson, who bought King Gillette’s home on Crescent Drive; Harold Lloyd; Rudolph Valentino; Tom Mix; Hobart Bosworth, who moved from Hollywood in order to be able to stable his horses at his home, horses being no longer welcome in Hollywood; Buster Keaton; Marion Davies; Wallace Beery, and studio moguls Louis B. Mayer, Carl Laemmle, and Thomas Ince.18
