by Marin Sardy
The sculpture was created by my grandfather’s friend, a Bauhaus designer who first titled it Stairway to Nowhere. This is the title I have always remembered, though the name was quickly changed to Double Ascension. I have read that “corporate executives rejected” the first title because it “did not reflect company goals.” This doesn’t sound like something my grandfather would say. In fact, he liked Stairway to Nowhere, its irreverence. He believed in art that challenged you, that asked you to consider alternate perspectives. Perhaps it was others who objected, and he acquiesced.
Walking across that plaza for the first time a few years ago, having made a point of visiting it while in Los Angeles for a conference, I commented to my friend Curran that the place made me remember how it felt to be part of my grandparents’ world, and what it is that money buys the very wealthy: the luxury of comfort anytime, anywhere. It’s in the way the rest of the world moves around you so that you may stay comfortable even while everyone else does not. You have your private plane, your fleet of servants, everyone taking care of everything for you, everything happening when you want it to happen. There is a peace and calm in the world of the very rich that does not exist anywhere else. I first tasted it during vacation visits to my grandparents—an open, soothing sensation that hung in the air around them—and I felt it for a moment in that plaza too. Just an echo, just enough to call them to mind. I noticed also that the ceilings of the porticoes at the bases of both towers were covered in a seemingly random pattern of small beige mosaic tiles. And these were the same tiles that lined the swimming pool at the ranch, except that those were blue. And this detail made me feel suddenly that my grandfather was right there—that this really was his piece of displaced sky, and he really did pass his days in an office on the fifty-first floor of the north tower, taking in a view that must reach many miles out to sea.
But that is the view from inside, and that is not where I am anymore. I have lived too many years apart from that buffered world. What I want to speak of now is what you see when you have been both inside and outside. What I want to say is that I went to Los Angeles and walked around the ARCO Towers and found them grand and terrible, and I have since felt unable to untwine the one sensation from the other.
* * *
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By the time I was old enough to know what questions to ask, my grandfather’s speech was labored and slow. A blood clot let loose during bypass surgery had lodged in his brain, causing a stroke that weakened and limited him for the last fifteen years of his life. His mind remained sharp right up to the end, however, and he was patient, had always been patient. I listened closely as he worked his way carefully through his sentences, knowing it was worth the wait. His memory was uncanny, his stories enchanting. But in hindsight I see that there was also a lot of name-dropping, a lot of shiny packaging. I loved best the anecdote about Truman Capote: Over lunch one day, Capote had watched a fly buzz about for half an hour and then said he could trace its exact path by memory. Perhaps I selected this story to love best because it was the least implicating. Other men my grandfather had been friendly with came up looking less rosy in the backlight of history: Nixon, the Shah of Iran. Men in business and politics, men whose crimes still haunt us.
In my life, the money was always distant. My father insisted it be this way, that we live off only what he could earn. So we did, and wealth was a phantasm I could fly into as into a storm each summer when we visited the ranch, where I was a farmhouse landing in Oz, playing awhile in my grandparents’ Technicolor world before returning to waking life. They regularly came to me too—to Anchorage, where they rented a suite on the top floor of the Hotel Captain Cook and held dinner parties at its long table, eating food ordered through room service and served by waiters from carts draped in white cloth. It was not until high school that I grasped the salient relationship between the place and the man—that Alaska meant something to my grandfather because there was oil there. That he meant something to Alaska because he had found the oil and delivered it to the world. And that this was, indirectly, how Alaska came to be my home.
Prudhoe Bay was his greatest find, the largest oil field ever discovered in North America. These words I memorized decades ago. They are part of the myth. They are its punch line, really, the end point of his story about the North Slope and its deep secrets. The story goes that other companies—BP and Sinclair—were also prospecting there, and that they, too, were convinced that its geology indicated there must be something down there to find. Logistics were a nightmare—the Arctic Ocean froze solid every winter, and there were no roads in the entire northern half of the state. Obstacles were overcome and wells were drilled. Came up dry. Again, again. One by one the other companies pulled out. It was too expensive, too risky. But ARCO stayed on until there was no one else left. It was time to give up. My grandfather said, “Dig one more.” And that was the drill that found the reserve at Prudhoe Bay.
I would like to know if this story is accurate. I do not know who to ask. Everyone I know to ask tells this same story. It is the story as he told it. It is the story as the book tells it. Surely, then, the facts are correct. It is just that there is something else about the story that doesn’t sit right, that has never sat right with me. It is that this is the story of a man congratulating himself. And so there is no way to trust it.
Later I came to prefer my grandmother’s versions of such stories, because they revealed more. For instance, that of a man I met once during a week away from college with my grandparents, as guests on their friends’ yacht in the Mediterranean. My grandfather said that the man, an arms dealer, was nicknamed Sunshine Boy because he was so bright and happy and delightful to be around. I was introduced to Sunshine Boy when I came through the main cabin from the sundeck to change for lunch. He was with a couple of other men whose names were not given. Years later, one day while Will and I sat with my grandmother over breakfast at her house in Roswell, she glanced at a newspaper headline about the overthrow of Qaddafi and said to me, “Qaddafi—you met him.” He had come onto the boat, she said, with Sunshine Boy. “Qaddafi nearly lost an eye,” she mused, “when he saw you and Adrienne come through in your bikinis.” Will grinned, then smiled the smile that meant he thought I was sexy. I laughed, grimaced, felt something reverberating through me.
* * *
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Before the ARCO Towers and Plaza were completed, in 1972, the site had belonged to the headquarters of the firm’s predecessor—a significantly shorter skyscraper known as the Richfield Oil Company Building. Constructed in 1928, in the Zigzag Moderne style of Art Deco architecture, it climbed in a series of wedding-cake-like tiers up to a tall spire shaped like an old-fashioned oil derrick, along which the word RICHFIELD descended in red neon letters. In the same way that New York’s Chrysler Building was designed to evoke the shape and speed of an automobile, the Richfield Building embodied black gold. Its exterior was covered in black tiles with vertical lines coated in gold leaf, giving the building an energetic thrust upward for the full twelve stories. Between those lines, a dramatic series of chevrons and turquoise tiles completed the facade, while around the top of the lowest tier, forty terra-cotta “guardian angels” with Roman armor and sleek, folded wings peered down at the street over an elaborate front doorway, all in gold.
The building was, in other words, spectacular. Peculiar and amazing, a temple of capitalism, an homage to the rise of industry. But it was by then considered obsolete for business purposes—the elevators too slow, the air-conditioning inadequate—and its square footage was deemed too small for the company’s needs. What’s more, its relatively small size meant it wouldn’t bring in much cash if leased out. Executives argued that, given property values in that part of the city, its eventual destruction was inevitable. Some in the community protested—a professor of urban design at UCLA and her students—but their voices amounted to little more than a ripple. In 1968, wrecking crews began tearing it down.<
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The building’s interior was as impressive as its facade. Walls, floors, and light fixtures were covered in design details, elaborate arrays of lines and arcs. The ceilings were sublime. The tall elevator door panels, crafted of etched bronze, bore a jazzy riot of zigzags and sunbursts. Two of these, the only things that ARCO salvaged out of the whole mess, were set standing at right angles in the stone floor at the back corner of the south tower portico. I have seen them, walked up to them, stared. One could say, perhaps, that the Richfield Building was not demolished so much as subsumed—made portion of one man’s personal mythology, and of the corporate vision of modernity.
The demolition took several months to complete and included the razing of an entire city block. Among the first things removed were the muscular angels that guarded the building, looking down on the street, positioned like gargoyles. Soldier angels, young and masculine, with helmets and breastplates and long, straight noses—each ten feet tall and weighing one and a half tons. They were torn from the structure one by one in a process that, by necessity, broke them in half. The figures were severed at the hip joints, leaving only the head and torso and the upper part of the wings. Afterward, the wrecking company sold them off for the cost of removing them—one hundred dollars each. The current whereabouts of most of the figures are unknown. One ended up in the downtown loft of a graphic designer who bought it from an elderly client, a man who had long ago purchased it from the wrecking company. Moving it required hiring a crane and a forklift. It was so heavy that he had to have a special base constructed for it.
I was surprised to learn that my grandfather had actually torn such a building down, had pushed ahead with it. This wasn’t the story I knew. I thought of the Big House at Circle Diamond, its collections of artifacts of the West and its people, rescued from decay. For a long time, I couldn’t square it. The Richfield Building has since been called a masterpiece, a lost treasure. Architects don’t necessarily agree. Some thought it gaudy, with that garish neon lettering, and it certainly lacked nuance. But it was beautiful in many ways and striking from a distance. It has long since been named one of the “most missed” demolished buildings in Los Angeles, and its loss is widely regarded as a travesty—made worse by the insult of replacing it with two blockish glass rectangles that, for the most part, do little to recommend themselves.
My grandfather’s vision, at least, was grand. The new complex was modeled after Rockefeller Center, with an underground shopping mall that linked the towers and was accessible by escalators from the street. It was meant to be active, a hub, drawing people in from all around. Still, destroying the Richfield Building didn’t sound to me like something he would do—even though it was done, according to another executive, “with tears in our eyes.” When I told people I didn’t get it, they gave me the same replies: It was that era. It was the thinking of the time. But, I kept thinking, he wasn’t like other oilmen. He gave to the arts and to universities, funded research on alternative energy, championed land conservation. He was an intellectual.
* * *
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The ARCO Towers—their size and significance, at least—were unknown to me until well into my adulthood. My family is large and diffuse, and my mother, struggling with mental illness, cut herself off from her parents for decades. She took us to see them on occasion, but mostly we stayed in their houses when they were not there. She never told me any stories about them, never explained much about who they were or what it meant. What I knew came mostly from my father, in scattered pieces, incomplete. And it came from what I absorbed, uncritically, of the objects in the houses we visited—the Big House at the ranch, the Red House in Aspen, the condo in Santa Fe. The dozens of paintings and drawings my grandfather commissioned—landscapes of his ranches and portraits of the pretty faces of daughters, sons, their wives. And other works he bought at auction—all manner of abstracts, oils, and sketches from Renaissance workshops.
One college summer break, during a few weeks with Curran in Ventura County, we spent a day at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Entering the building that housed its modern and contemporary collection, I looked up and saw my grandfather’s name on its exterior wall. The building, which was added on to the original museum in 1986, was named after him. I knew nothing of this, so Curran pulled me to the admissions desk to ask the clerk for details, to confirm that indeed this was my grandfather. The clerk gushed for a few minutes and then gave me a free ticket. She was thrilled. I was thrilled.
But as time passed, the memory of that experience and others disoriented me. The way money inspired extreme responses—enthusiasm or animosity, not much in between. I was afraid to be the object of animosity, but neither did I understand the enthusiasm. I could see that people liked to be near money, or near someone who, like me, was near money—that there was vicarious pleasure in that. But I saw, too, that while money elevated me in some eyes, it brought out a cold burn in others. This was the part I wanted to disavow. The money was not mine—it belonged to my grandparents. And yet it had made me subtly different from everyone I knew, in ways I could only barely see. It did not occur to me that someday there might be millions for me. Not then and not for several years after, not until other questions led me to finally put together that I would eventually have been given a share that was, by middle-class standards, enormous. But this is just as well, because by the time that day came, the fortune was gone.
In retrospect I can see that money’s insidious power lies precisely in the objects that it buys. It lies in the capacity of the tangible to validate the intangible. My grandparents’ money placed rewards all around us, all day long—physical, observable rewards. And the mind’s subterranean logic so easily takes this to mean that we are deserving. Not, perhaps, more deserving than all others. But deserving nonetheless. This is how money makes the wealthy believe they are right in their choices, their opinions, their attitudes. It validates those choices simply by providing objects that reflect all this back at them, leading them to believe that there is an inherent and undeniable rightness about them. It happens unconsciously. There is no getting around it.
It was not until I discovered that my own hard work would often come without rewards that I could see this—not until I discovered firsthand that money is not an inevitable result of being good, doing good, working hard. That the economics of the twenty-first century do not reliably deliver wealth, or even a decent living, for many skills and talents. And although I was born into that feeling of rightness, over the years I have felt it erode, bit by bit. And now I fight to hang on to it. Because it looks like success and it feels like confidence. I fight by keeping around me the objects of my memories. Some paintings my grandparents left behind. An oil portrait of my mother. And a favorite large abstract that I used to stare at in the Santa Fe condo, the one that now resides in my stairwell on the only wall in the house that is large enough to hold it.
* * *
—
Walking north from the ARCO Towers on that day with Curran a few years ago, past a handful of other corporate skyscrapers from that era, I could see that it was fairly standard to place a large sculpture in an open space before the building. Curran commented, as we passed two different ones, that they were stunningly, comically phallic. Tall, tilted, narrow. The second, which was also cylindrical, seemed so obvious that I couldn’t understand how it could have ever been not obvious. It featured several loops of metal swirling at its base in a way that strikingly suggested pubic hair. We laughed out loud, but as we walked on, my laughter gave way to a jagged relief that these were not my grandfather’s buildings, that his plaza’s sculpture was nothing like these. And I wondered about how such obvious things can so easily go unseen. How it ties in to something about power, and men, and money, and complicity. Something irreducible about the flow of energy in the world, about who directs the flow and why.
I have a way of talking about the things my grandfather did: He built
the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. He built the Towers. He built them. But what I mean is that he orchestrated the building of them, or financed the building of them, or decided that they would be built. The work was done by someone else’s hands. And yet, with built, I claim this work as his own. I conflate idea and action, order and obedience, boss and employee. It is a kind of synecdoche, in which the man at the top stands in for all who hold him up. They are of him—aspects, expressions, manifestations of his will. I have not intended to do this, have not realized I do this.
Now I am tangled, caught in a tangle. I know that I, too, am one of the subsumed. Along with my grandmother, five aunts and two uncles, their wives and husbands, my many cousins, his employees, and the staff who kept his households running—Mexican ranch hands, black servants. Maids, housekeepers, gardeners, cooks, and the nanny who cared especially for my mother, a woman we called “Lala.” The small, dark woman my mother trusted, I suspect, above all others. Lula Webster. That was the woman’s name. I want you to know her name.
I know that my grandfather fancied himself like an English lord, and grew broad, manicured lawns around the Big House to mimic those at a manor. There was a white gazebo near the creek and peacocks that wandered around the grounds, dropping iridescent feathers for us children to gather. I know that the family portrait he commissioned, which hung not long ago on loan in a museum, features all seven of his children but only two of their spouses—the sons’ wives. It is a complex composition, with eleven people positioned among rocks and trees, and at the visual center, where the eye is drawn, are the two most attractive daughters. All his daughters’ husbands are notably absent. They were not, apparently, part of his domain.