The Battle for Beverly Hills

by Nancie Clare

  Fighting to stop the annexation movement was Lloyd’s first civic involvement in the city that would be his home until his death in 1971, but it would be far from his last. Lloyd was one of the supporters of the iconic Electric Fountain, which features the statue of a Native American praying while waters illuminated by colored lights dance around it. The fountain, located at the intersection of Wilshire and Santa Monica boulevards, anchors the west end of Beverly Gardens Park, the greensward that runs the length of the portion of Santa Monica Boulevard contained within Beverly Hills. Lloyd also played a less positive role in the city. In the early 1940s, when black actors and businessmen expressed interest in moving to Beverly Hills, he joined a neighborhood association whose goal was to enforce the city’s restrictive covenants that prohibited nonwhites, which included Jews, from buying or renting property in the city. The action was dismissed in federal court; in 1948 the Supreme Court would rule that restrictive covenants based on race could not be enforced.

  It’s not an overstatement to say that Tom Mix, born in 1880 in Mix Run, Pennsylvania, invented the celluloid cowboy hero archetype who is clean-cut and always saves the day, and along with it, the Western. He got his start after getting a job as a cowboy at the Miller Brothers 101 Ranch in Oklahoma and appearing in its Wild West Show. Mix wielded enough clout in the early days of Hollywood that not only was Fox Film Corporation paying him $7,500 a week, but it also built “Mixville,” a twelve-acre indoor-outdoor set on the grounds of the Edendale lot located in what is now the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles.

  Mix was an addition to the team that would have pleased both Mary Pickford and Doug Fairbanks. Like Doug, Tom Mix was a man’s man, full of bravado and nerve. Also like Doug Fairbanks, Mix did most of his own stunts. (For a long time Mix claimed he did all of his own stunts, but there were a few instances where stunt doubles were used.)

  Mix and Fairbanks would have parted ways, however, when it came to Mix’s fondness for drink. (In March 1924, Tom Mix had an altercation with his wife Victoria Forde, the facts of which differ greatly depending on the teller of the story. But the end of the story is not in doubt: Victoria shot her husband in the arm, the bullet finally lodged next to Mix’s spine, and alcohol was involved. No one was arrested and the facts of the case were hushed up by the studios for almost ten years.)8

  As someone who had almost no formal education within the walls of a schoolroom, Mary would have appreciated Mix’s voracious reading. Journalist, novelist, and screenwriter Adela Rogers St. Johns, who wrote screenplays for Mix, admired the cowboy actor for reading the entirety of Shakespeare’s plays because he felt he should. The two would discuss the Bard’s works and St. Johns felt Mix’s take on the plays was “enthusiastic and well reasoned.”9

  Perhaps most importantly for the anti-annexation cause, Mix had an instinctive feel for branding—literally. Mix had his brand, TM, set at an angle and surrounded by a diamond shape,10 imbedded in the tires of his cars so the impression could be readily seen on the many unpaved roads in the Los Angeles area. He also hung a giant “TM” in neon lights above his Beverly Hills mansion. The over-the-topness of Mix’s self-promotion was certainly not in the same wheelhouse as Mary’s more circumspect approach to fame, but she must have recognized its value to the cause. Tom Mix burned bright in the local consciousness and there have always been people who are attracted to flamboyant displays. Mary knew that sort of flamboyance would work to the cause’s advantage.

  Will Rogers, the other cowboy of the group, and Beverly Hills are inexorably linked, even though he moved to his Pacific Palisades ranch in the late 1920s. He was the honorary mayor of Beverly Hills, a position that afforded him the opportunity for countless self-deprecating jabs. Rogers helped with publicity for the city’s real estate companies; the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel took its name by virtue of the fact that Rogers and his polo-playing buddies used it as a post-match watering hole; and the park just south of the hotel, where Sunset Boulevard and North Beverly and North Canon drives intersect, was named for him in 1952. Starting in 1922, the year before the annexation vote, until his death in 1935, long after he had moved from the city itself, it would be Will Rogers, as much as anyone, who would help raise the city’s profile by using Beverly Hills as the dateline on his syndicated column.

  Rogers, part Cherokee on both sides of his family, was born in Cherokee Nation, Indian Territory, which would become Oklahoma, to an upper-middle-class family in 1879. After trying—and failing—to become a cowboy on the Argentinian pampas, Rogers decamped to post–Boer War South Africa, where he worked on a ranch in Natal province. After doing rope tricks in an Australian circus, Rogers returned to the United States and worked the vaudeville circuit, eventually ending up in New York City. He was lured to Hollywood in 1918 to ply his wrangling skills in silent films, a bit ironic considering his performances in the Ziegfeld Follies were a combination of cowboy rope tricks and wry political observation. Will Rogers could talk. He was witty and came off as a likable, wholesome, sensible family man who never took himself or the trappings of wealth too seriously. It was a rare individual who did not fall under his charming spell, which was exactly what Mary was counting on.

  Director Fred Niblo also hailed from the state of Nebraska. He was born Frederick Liedtke in 1874, adopting the stage name Fred Niblo when he began performing in vaudeville. He took a break from performing when he married George M. Cohan’s older sister, Josephine, and began managing the Four Cohans. Niblo’s film career began 1912 in Australia.

  After Josephine’s death in 1916, Niblo moved to Hollywood, where his directorial career took off. He directed Douglas Fairbanks in two of his biggest films, The Mark of Zorro and The Three Musketeers. Niblo also directed Rudolph Valentino in Blood and Sand. Niblo is perhaps best known, however, as being the principal director of Ben-Hur, which became the third-highest-grossing silent film of all time.

  Although not as famous to the general public as the rest of the anti-annexation team, Fred Niblo was a wise choice for the task at hand. As one of the first stars of the silver screen to move to Beverly Hills, taking up residence not long after the city incorporated, he was well known to his fellow residents. Even more in his favor, perhaps, his civic commitment predates Pickford and Fairbanks’: Niblo, along with actor Charles Ray, and local real estate developers and businessmen, formed a company to create a community store in the commercial district of Beverly Hills during World War One.

  Conrad Nagel, like Will Rogers, came from an upper-middle-class home in the Midwest. In Nagel’s case, his father was dean of the Highland Park College Music Conservatory in Des Moines, Iowa, and his mother was a locally renowned singer. After graduating from college, Nagel decided to try his luck in the new medium of moving pictures. Studio executives were sold on his all-American appeal, his six-foot-one-inch height, and his wholesome Midwestern good looks. He was smart and well organized and liked living in Beverly Hills. The depth of his pro–Beverly Hills feelings would come to the fore a few years after the annexation vote, when he would head a movement to build a wall around Beverly Hills to keep the outer world at bay.11 Doug Fairbanks would join Nagel in the effort to build the wall around Beverly Hills.

  If there was a dark horse on Team Anti-Annexation, it was Rudolph Valentino. It’s safe to assume that it was Mary who asked him to join the effort, because Doug Fairbanks was extremely possessive of Mary and jealous of even the most cursory attention paid to her by any man, let alone the 1920s equivalent of the sexiest man alive. The thought that Valentino might so much as look at Mary, let alone speak to her privately, would be enough to send Doug into a fury. But Mary knew what she was doing. In 1923 Valentino, who was an intensely private and sensitive man who had endured his share of innuendo and scandal, including suggestions of homosexuality and an arrest for bigamy before The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and The Sheik made him a household name, was one of the biggest stars there was. It didn’t matter to Mary that Valentino hadn’t even settled in B
everly Hills yet—he bought Falcon Lair, his estate in Beverly Hills, after the annexation vote. Mary realized that it was his desire for privacy that would motivate him to sacrifice it for a short time to help the anti-annexation cause. That, and she also knew that Rudolph Valentino had something the other seven, who were also at the absolute pinnacles of their careers, did not: time.

  In late 1922 and early 1923, Valentino was on a “one-man strike,” as he told the press, against the Famous Players studio to whom he was under contract. At the time he was making $1,250 a week with a promise of an increase to $3,000 a week in the following three years. It may have been a fortune at a time when the average annual earnings for an American household were $2,000, but Valentino pointed out that Mary Pickford had been earning $10,000 a week in 1916. While his contract was in dispute, Valentino couldn’t work in motion pictures. With free time on his hands and the promise of an independent city to call home in the near future, Valentino even agreed to a photo op of a door-to-door canvass in the campaign against annexation.

  This then was the force of celebrity, and the power of it dawned on Mary Pickford. Who wouldn’t open the door to Valentino? Or any of the other seven campaigning against annexation, for that matter? Instantly recognizable, defining what these eight had as “a head start” in forwarding a cause doesn’t come close to explaining how they were able to penetrate even the wealthiest and most exclusive of enclaves. The wealthy and the well connected succumbed to movie star dazzle as readily as factory workers; celebrity seemed to transcend any boundary.

  10

  Playing with Fire

  It took a big story to catch the reading attention of the citizenry of Los Angeles in the early 1920s. On any given day there were at least six papers covering the news of the comings and goings—including engagements, nuptials, and divorces—of the moving picture stars, Volstead Act scofflaws, the arrests of bigamists, and traffic accidents involving women drivers. Not to mention the frenzied, continuing coverage of the pursuit of Clara Phillips—dubbed the Tiger Woman—who in late 1922 had murdered a rival for her husband’s affections with a hammer purchased at a local five-and-dime, had been arrested, escaped from the county jail, and was being pursued by the Los Angeles County Sheriff all the way to a hideout in the jungles of Honduras.1

  In the early part of the twentieth century bombs were often the weapon of choice for those who took violent exception to a government policy. And newspapers were among the targets. On October 1, 1910, union activist brothers John J. and James B. McNamara placed a suitcase packed with sixteen sticks of dynamite and equipped with a faulty timer in an alley next to the Los Angeles Times building. Because the bomb went off at one a.m. instead of four a.m., when the building was supposed to be empty, twenty-one Times employees were killed and more than a hundred were injured. While the bomb itself wouldn’t have been able to bring down the substantial building located at Broadway and First Street, it was placed over a gas main and the resulting explosion and fire were catastrophic. The blast rocked downtown Los Angeles and its metaphorical reverberations were felt for decades. It was the fieriest and costliest battle between union organizers and Harrison Gray Otis, the adamantly anti-union publisher of the paper, and one of the deadliest acts of terrorism in the early part of the twentieth century. But long after the reason the McNamara brothers, who eventually pled guilty to the charges, had bombed the Times faded from memory, the impact of the explosion on the psyche of the city remained. Even in 1923—thirteen years later—in Los Angeles, bombs at newspapers were taken seriously. They caught, and kept, the city’s attention.

  (The subsequent 1911 trial of the brothers, who were represented by Clarence Darrow, was dubbed “the trial of the century,” replacing the Leopold and Loeb “trial of the century” that had taken place in Chicago in 1904. There wouldn’t be another “trial of the century” until Roscoe Arbuckle’s three trials for manslaughter in San Francisco in 1922.)

  It wasn’t the turbulent era’s only bomb. Anarchists had set off a bomb on July 22, 1916, during a parade in San Francisco for Preparedness Day, proclaimed in anticipation of America’s entry into World War One. That bomb killed ten and injured forty, and the same anarchists were purportedly responsible for a black powder bomb set off in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1917 that killed nine policemen. And then an explosion went off that cut wealthy capitalists, including many of Beverly Hills’ most prominent citizens, to the quick. On September 16, 1920, a bomb carried in a horse-drawn wagon parked across the street from the headquarters of the J.P. Morgan Bank on Wall Street exploded. It killed thirty people outright, with another eight dying of injuries sustained in the blast, and more than a hundred and forty individuals were seriously hurt. After the blast, trading was halted on the New York Stock Exchange to forestall panic selling, but in the haste to clean up and get the exchange open for business the next day, practically all of the evidence was destroyed or seriously compromised. Investigators were flummoxed—initially because, as there was a fair amount of construction going on in the area, they thought the explosion might have been an accident. That theory was eliminated when flyers were found at a nearby post office with the ominous message: “Remember we will not tolerate any longer. Free the political prisoners or it will be sure death for all of you. [Signed] American Anarchist Fighters.” The era’s forces of evil—at least according to capitalists and law enforcement—organized labor, anarchists, and Communists were afoot in the land and they were delivering bombs. The investigation into the Wall Street bombing would remain active for more than three years and there would be occasional updates in the newspapers.

  So a bomb exploding in Beverly Hills at its weekly newspaper’s offices in the early days of the annexation campaign was an alarming turn of events, to say the least. With approximately one thousand generally well-heeled inhabitants that included famous film stars, studio moguls, business titans, and the head of The System, L.A.’s crime syndicate, Beverly Hills was a small town populated with big egos. No one was on the fence when it came to the issue of annexation to Los Angeles, but at most the back and forth between those against and those in favor of joining the bigger city had been a vigorous war of words, as befitted a city populated with wealthy, educated citizens. There were signs in shop windows, placards on lawns, banners spanning major intersections, meetings at homes and at the Beverly Hills Hotel, meet-and-greets with autograph signings by celebrities, and editorials in the local paper both for and against. Behind the scenes there was certainly scheming, along the lines of Stanley Anderson appropriating the letter from the office of hydraulic engineer J. B. Lippincott that clearly indicated the Rodeo Land and Water Company was not telling citizens the whole story when it came to available water resources. But in spite of the fact that almost everyone had at least a long gun in their homes to deal with marauding coyotes and to dispatch injured wildlife, nothing had driven the citizens of Beverly Hills, or their neighbors in Los Angeles, for that matter, to violence over this issue.

  That is, until February 26, when the “Infernal Machine,” as the press referred to the bomb, exploded in the hands of pro-annexation Al Murphy, the editor-publisher of the Beverly Hills News. Accompanying the device was a chilling note: “The Hour at Which You Must Make the Decision Has Arrived. Lay Off the Annexation Stuff. Our Next Move Will Be T.N.T.” It was signed: K.K.K. And, purportedly, it wasn’t the first explosive device that had been deployed in response to the annexation proposal. Clark Fogg, senior forensic specialist of the Beverly Hills Police Department, recalls retired Beverly Hills police officers telling him of another bomb that had been planted at the Beverly Hills Civic Center, which hadn’t exploded, before the one that had detonated at the offices of the Beverly Hills News.2

  This shocking turn of events rocked the community and beyond. Even accounting for clandestine maneuverings between members of the city government and representatives of the Rodeo Land and Water Company on the question of who would supply the city’s water, the annexation was not being handled
as a backroom deal with no public input. A petition requesting a special election to settle the question of annexation had been circulated and was days from being presented to the Board of Trustees of the City of Beverly Hills when the bomb exploded.

  In 1923 the medium of radio was still in its infancy, especially as a disseminator of news. To get the attention of the community, the region, the nation, and the world, an event had to make the papers, the more the better. In the case of the Beverly Hills News bomber, if the goal was to attract attention, he, she, or they got their wish. News of the explosion was covered in five of the Los Angeles daily papers: the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Record, Los Angeles Evening Herald, Los Angeles Evening Express, and Los Angeles Examiner. Over the next few days the story of the bombing was picked up and printed in papers across the country—it would appear as a small item on the front page, above the fold, of the New York Times on March 1, 1923—bringing attention to what had been a rather mundane political interaction between two cities at the western edge of the United States. Suddenly, the battle for Beverly Hills had taken an ugly turn and the whole country knew about it.

  Beverly Hills News editor Al Murphy, who despite some reporting to the contrary, received only superficial burns to his hands when he triggered the device, took his fifteen minutes of fame seriously and went to town giving quotes to any reporter of a Los Angeles daily paper who would listen. The splashiest coverage by far came from William Randolph Hearst’s Los Angeles Examiner, where the explosion made the front page on February 27, 1923, in the over-the-top reporting that was the signature style for a Hearst newspaper. The coverage was full of drama and hyperbole. Murphy’s most copious quotes were in the Examiner, where he declared that he was the target because of his personal and, through his paper, professional stand in favor of annexation. “I have received numerous threats, both by telephone and unsigned letters, in the past few weeks, but this machine is the first actual attempt to do me bodily harm. I have armed myself and am ready for their next move,” Murphy proclaimed to the Examiner reporter.3 Murphy also stated that he had taken what was left of the bomb to Los Angeles sheriff William I. Traeger to check for fingerprints and that he gave the sheriff “the names of the parties whom he strongly suspects of being responsible.” The Los Angeles Evening Express reported that suspects had been named and there would be little difficulty in bringing “the guilty parties to justice.”4 The Los Angeles Record went as far as reporting that the persons who planted the bomb had “attempted to kill Al Murphy, Beverly Hills editor, by means of an infernal machine,”5 which was a big leap from Murphy’s own assertion that the bomber wished to injure him.