The Battle for Beverly Hills

by Nancie Clare

  Los Angeles not only lacked aesthetic appeal in its architecture and planning, it was dirty and smelly. By 1920, the city and its adjacent communities produced almost 25 percent of the world’s petroleum. Oil production is a filthy business, from its exploration and extraction to its refinement and transport.

  In some ways it’s understandable why the Rodeo Land and Water Company didn’t see a problem annexing Beverly Hills to Los Angeles. After all, the company had originally been called Amalgamated Oil and its intention had been to find and extract petroleum from the land it purchased. Becoming land developers had been plan B when the oil under the ground failed to materialize.

  Los Angeles had evolved differently in its growth, but it was depressingly similar to other large American cities when it came to political corruption and organized crime—similar, but not quite the same. Like every other city in the United States, Prohibition boosted the scope and reach of organized crime in Los Angeles and encouraged its companion, political corruption, to move from the fringes to center stage, corroding the integrity of every level of the criminal justice system along the way. Unlike its counterparts to the east, though, organized crime in Los Angeles wasn’t in the hands of mobs based on ethnic origins that had evolved along with the cities where they lived, like the Irish, Italians, and Jews in New York City, Boston, and Chicago. Los Angeles in the 1920s did organized crime its own way. It had its own syndicate, The System, that in its low-profile way controlled bootlegging, prostitution, gambling, and loan-sharking, but instead of gangs that maintained monetary relationships with politicians, L.A.’s crime and political corruption were one and the same. As of 1920, crime and graft were centralized in Los Angeles’ City Hall and the LAPD was an active partner. It was a civilized arrangement made up of prominent men who made sure businesses on both sides of the law were working smoothly. The era of Mickey Cohen was still more than ten years in the future. In the early 1920s, there were no shootouts in the streets pitting law enforcement against machine-gun-toting hoodlums. City government, the business community, and police all participated in the graft and glad-handing that made their world go round, and they did it without drawing undue attention to themselves. Political fixer Kent Kane Parrot, who had played football at USC and whose first wife was the screenwriter Mary O’Hara, had set the stage for The System through his unique, though nefarious, coalition building that brought together such disparate delegations as church leaders, liberals, conservatives, teetotalers, and bootleggers.3 In 1921 Parrot engineered the election of George Cryer, someone who was sympathetic to an enlightened approach toward vice, as mayor of L.A. In Charlie Crawford, who earlier in the twentieth century had created a fully integrated approach to crime in Seattle before moving to Los Angeles in 1910 to open The Maple Bar, which became a front for the criminal enterprise he subsequently built, Parrot discovered a man who understood the always subtly shifting ground that was the territory where political influence met criminal activities. Crawford was the type of guy Parrot needed to perfect The System. Between the two of them, money from all manner of illegal activities, from prostitution and loan-sharking to bootlegging and protection, would flow from Crawford to Parrot to be disseminated through City Hall and the LAPD headquarters.

  The few reformers who made it from the ballot to office, including Thomas Lee Woolwine, who was the Los Angeles County district attorney at the time of the annexation attempt, didn’t enjoy long tenures in office. Even Woolwine, while overall an honest prosecutor and a pillar of virtue when compared with his fellow elected officials, was not above protecting his friends from being investigated in the murder of William Desmond Taylor. Woolwine remains a paragon of integrity, though, when contrasted with his successor, Asa Keyes, who was convicted of bribery in the Julian Pete (short for Julian Petroleum) scandal, which was a homegrown Los Angeles pyramid scheme in which citizens from all walks of life were fleeced out of millions of dollars.

  For the most part, the residents of Beverly Hills were neither innocents nor fools; they were wealthy, worldly, and under no illusions. What went on in Los Angeles’ City Hall, in the police precincts, and the courts was no secret. They knew who all the players in The System’s drama were. Some of them were even neighbors: Charlie Crawford, who ran The System and made his living from bordellos, casinos, and speakeasies, lived with his wife and young daughters on North Rexford Drive in Beverly Hills.

  But it wasn’t just the physical aesthetics and the philosophical unsavoriness that made those citizens of Beverly Hills opposed to annexation wary of joining Los Angeles. In fact, annexing to Los Angeles was a leap in the dark on both sides of the campaign. For those who wished for Beverly Hills to remain an independent city, the question was where they could obtain water if annexation was voted down. But there were no guarantees that voting to join the City of Los Angeles was going to have a happy, not to mention financially advantageous, ending, either.

  In order to finance the herculean task of bringing water from the Owens Valley as well as upgrading the city’s infrastructure and services, Los Angeles had voted on and passed a number of bond issues between the years of 1905 and 1922. The first, in 1905, was for $1.5 million; the next, in 1907, was for $23 million. In the years leading up to 1923 there were bonds for electric plants, harbor improvement, fire protection, libraries, and sewage treatment totaling millions and millions of dollars at a time when $1 million equaled just over $14 million in today’s money. The total amount of the bond indebtedness of the City of Los Angeles, which was included on Beverly Hills Resolution #73, which called for the election, was almost $84 million. The wording of Resolution #73 was ambiguous; it didn’t indicate exactly how much of the outstanding bond debt Beverly Hills would be responsible for. There were good reasons for this fiduciary vagueness. Not only was the proposal to vote for annexation a unilateral action on the part of the Rodeo Land and Water Company, there were no terms or guarantees from the City of Los Angeles to Beverly Hills if the vote ended in favor of annexation. There had been no negotiations between the two cities prior to the annexation vote. In fact, according to the 1909 amendment of Article XXV, Section 257 “Annexation, Consolidation of City and County Governments” of the Los Angeles’ civil code, “… it shall be lawful, under the charter of the city of Los Angeles, to annex or join to the city of Los Angeles any contiguous city or town in Los Angeles County, incorporated under the general laws of the State … to be governed under the charter of the city of Los Angeles, and the question of annexation or joinder to the City of Los Angeles may be voted upon at an election to be called and held provided by law.”4 Los Angeles did not go out and solicit additional cities and unincorporated territory; the process of annexation had to start in the community that wished to join the larger city. Once a city had voted that it wished to annex, there would be an election in Los Angeles to see if it wanted to annex the other city. Had its vote for annexation been successful, Beverly Hills would not have had any sort of previous agreement in place as to how much of the bond’s debt burden it would be expected to assume. Beverly Hills would have had to first wait to see if Los Angeles even wanted it, and then it would find out how much it would cost. The resolution’s lack of specificity had the potential to come back and bite Beverly Hills in the pocketbook in a big way, because once Los Angeles voted to annex a city, “… the City Council … shall also exercise the powers of a Board of Supervisors, including the power to levy and collect taxes, as may be authorized by law, upon all property within such consolidated city and county.”5 A generous interpretation of the terms by Los Angeles could leave Beverly Hills on the hook for a rather large portion of the outstanding debt, at interest rates that ranged between 4 and 6.5 percent per annum. Going forward, if the annexation was approved, property in Beverly Hills would “after such consolidation, be subject to taxation at the same rate with the property in said City of Los Angeles to pay the bonded indebtedness of the City of Los Angeles specified in said petition…”6 not to mention the potential for special assess
ments levied and fees paid to Los Angeles going forward. To anyone reading the Resolution, it looked as though the Rodeo Land and Water Company was indeed looking at its own self-interest in getting out from under the responsibility of providing water and other services for the City of Beverly Hills, and it wasn’t particularly concerned with the debt with which the residents of the city would be saddled for a very, very long time to come. By joining Los Angeles, Beverly Hills might have had to pay dearly for the privilege of receiving water from the Owens Valley.

  Aside from the potential financial burden, the residents of Beverly Hills had only to look a few miles east to Hollywood, which had been an independent city between 1903 and 1910, to see examples of what would happen to their concept of a “garden city.” Beverly Hills’ curvilinear streets, each lined with one type of tree, and expansive lots would probably not survive City of Los Angeles zoning. Waterfalls on private property? Horses? Independent schools? Probably not. To the celebrity and noncelebrity residents alike, annexation might bring Owens Valley water flowing out of the faucets in their homes, but the costs would include seeing their own private Xanadu fall by the wayside.

  Silsby Spalding, the president of the Beverly Hills Board of Trustees at the time of the annexation vote, was opposed to annexation not because of cultural, aesthetic considerations, or the ego-fulfillment of running his own town his way. Spalding believed that independence would be advantageous to Beverly Hills through better public services and a lower tax rate. In the end, giving citizens more bang for their tax buck would help Beverly Hills more than cheap water that would come at a cost of high taxes and having to stand in line to get services from an overextended Los Angeles bureaucracy.7

  What were the residents supposed to believe? At first many felt that it stood to reason that the Rodeo Land and Water Company was telling the truth about the lack of availability of potable water. It might not be what they wanted, but joining Los Angeles seemed like the only reasonable option. After all, they had to have water.

  After Stanley Anderson purloined a copy of the letter from hydraulic engineer J. B. Lippincott to Burton Green that indicated there was the potential for enough local water for up to thirty thousand residents, he and his fellow prominent citizens of Beverly Hills who were opposed to annexation, with whom he shared its contents, knew the truth. It wasn’t so much a lack of available water that was stopping the Rodeo Land and Water Company, but rather a lack of will to spend the money to sink wells and treat the water that was pumped.8 But Anderson was in a bit of a pickle. He had discovered the Rodeo Land and Water Company’s duplicity through chicanery. To widely publicize the letter would cast aspersions on his standing, something he rightfully was not willing to do because, should the Rodeo Land and Water Company prevail in its wish to push through the annexation, Anderson would still have to work with them. According to the transcript of the 1946 conversation, Anderson had originally appropriated the letter in order to hold it over Lippincott, who had agreed, for a fee, to make a number of appearances on behalf of the independence efforts and to say that water was indeed available. Anderson wanted to make sure that Lippincott didn’t take a fee from the pro-annexationists and double-cross them by claiming that there wasn’t enough water. But how to get the message across to ordinary citizens that annexation to Los Angeles wasn’t the only reasonable answer? Even before Lippincott had agreed to appear at community meetings on the subject of obtaining more potable water, there had already been meetings held on the subject, like the one at the Rodeo School where Silsby Spalding had been booed by employees of the Rodeo Land and Water Company. More than $52,000 had been raised at William Joyce’s dinner to fund an anti-annexation campaign. That amount would buy plenty of signs and banners for lawns and windows and to hang across intersections, as well as to purchase advertising space, but would signs and meetings be enough? Beverly Hills’ prominent anti-annexation citizens such as Stanley Anderson, Silsby Spalding, and William Joyce were personable fellows and well liked in their community. They approached the threat of annexation seriously; Spalding hired a Colonel Sufton, whom Firminger described as “a first class public relations man,” while pointing out “[Sufton] did not reside here,” to run the anti-annexation campaign. Firminger adds that Beverly Hills resident Frank G. Denison, who worked for Chapman Ice Cream (soon to introduce ice cream parlors in the shape of upside-down cones), was on hand to see to the details. The annexationists were serious as well. Running the campaign was Rodeo Land and Water Company executive Harrison Lewis, the man who had attempted to talk William Joyce over to the pro-annexation side while Silsby Spalding listened, out of sight, in an adjoining room. Lewis was no stranger to attracting attention with publicity stunts: At the nineteenth annual California Real Estate Association meeting held in Santa Ana, California, that concluded on December 9, 1922, Lewis flew in an airplane and personally dropped leaflets on the attendees proclaiming that Beverly Hills was “Los Angeles’ most wonderful suburban community.”9

  Had the annexation attempt taken place six years earlier, before World War One, or in another town, the conventional steps of hiring public relations professionals and placing signs and banners on both sides of the issue would have probably been the extent of their efforts. But Beverly Hills in the heady days of the early 1920s was no ordinary town. And while it’s true that the anti-annexationists among the city’s civic establishment took what they felt was a necessary, albeit conventional, route to a campaign for the cause of remaining independent, they had more ammunition at their disposal than they might have initially been aware of. They had Mary Pickford.

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  Dramatis Personae

  There is no contemporaneous documentation that pinpoints exactly when Mary Pickford found out about the proposed annexation of Beverly Hills to Los Angeles, or when she came on board as the leader of the celebrity intervention that would take place to help prevent it. One reasonable scenario is that either Stanley Anderson, a friend of Doug Fairbanks and one of the original organizers of the anti-annexation movement, or Silsby Spalding, also an anti-annexationist who had rented his estate, Grayhall, to Fairbanks in 1918, let the monarchs of Pickfair know what was being planned for their realm. Or perhaps Mary first found out about the annexation from seeing the circulating petition that would bring the question of annexation to Los Angeles to a vote. It could even have been someone in the pro camp, such as Burton Green or another member of the Rodeo Land and Water Company, who told Pickford.

  Regardless of when she found out and from whom, it is safe to say that Mary Pickford decided to oppose the annexation based on her own analysis of the situation. She didn’t need men, in positions of authority or otherwise, to make up her mind for her. Mary Pickford, sometimes with the help of her mother, Charlotte, sometimes without, had been more than capable of making decisions without the input of men, who by virtue of their sex and place in the world of business felt they knew best. Mary Pickford determined what was best for Mary Pickford. Once a situation was explained, Mary would filter the facts through her own, and by extension her family’s, best self-interest. But why would she care one way or the other if Beverly Hills annexed itself to Los Angeles? For one thing, Mary Pickford was a control freak. In her career, she looked at the revenue streams for the motion picture industry and was one of the first stars to form her own production studio, which not only gave her control of the roles she played, but also control of her fellow cast members, directors, and cinematographers as well as the marketing and advertising. Film distribution was another area where studios helmed by Adolph Zukor and Jesse Lasky made money, for not only did they distribute films produced by their studios, they also distributed films of other production companies as well. Mary, along with her husband Doug Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, and D. W. Griffith, founded United Artists to distribute the films their eponymous production companies made. Mary kept a tight rein on her image, and her business acumen was not the public story she wanted to tell. Mary’s fans wanted a chaste, forever woman-chi
ld and that’s what she delivered. She and her studio kept rigid control on how she was depicted in photos: no pens in her hand that could be mistaken for cigarettes and always dressed modestly. She “wrote” a newspaper column extolling old-fashioned values and virtues such as obeying your husband and eschewing gossip. By 1923, the year of the attempted annexation, Mary Pickford would have been a big fish in any pond, but in Beverly Hills, she was a whale. She and Doug ruled the city; they were the magnet that brought bold-faced names to visit them at Pickfair, some of whom liked the neighborhood so much they settled there. The Beverly Hills she lived in was her own creation; she was in charge of the holiday decorations for the city, she and Doug provided funds for the fire brigade. She was a poor girl married to a half-Jew who had worked her way to the pinnacle of Beverly Hills, a new city unencumbered by a Social Register. At this point in her career, she probably had no reason to fear being snubbed by Los Angeles blue bloods, but there were no guarantees that her status as the undisputed queen of the city would carry over after annexation. By her reckoning, filtered through her own self-interest, it was to her advantage to do everything she could to ensure that Beverly Hills remained an independent city. So great was her confidence in herself that it made perfect sense, at least to Mary, that she bring her considerable organizational drive and project management skills to bear.