Water to the Angels: William Mulholland, His Monumental Aqueduct, and the Rise of Los Angeles

by Standiford, Les

  An article by Donald C. Jackson and Norris Hundley Jr., published in a 2004 issue of California History, took Rogers to task, however, for what the authors described as an attempt to exonerate Mulholland, castigating Rogers for his closing comment that “we should be so lucky as to have any men with just half his character, integrity, imagination and leadership today.” Jackson and Hundley quoted Mulholland colleagues J. B. Lippincott and John Freeman (an original member of the Aqueduct Advisory Board and a consultant on the Panama Canal), who shared their own private concerns during the inquiry that Mulholland had proceeded imprudently in building the St. Francis Dam without sufficient outside consultation, especially given the suspect nature of the foundations. Jackson and Hundley say that, while Mulholland suffered death threats and lived with an armed guard at his house for some time after, they lament that “professional colleagues did not publicly pillory him.”

  It is the position of the authors—professors of history who have written extensively about dams built in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—that in fact dam-building science was more advanced than Rogers suggests, and that if Mulholland was not aware of certain basic precepts of concrete dam building at the time, he should have been. In their opinion, it was likely conceit that prompted Mulholland to make peremptory decisions concerning the construction of the St. Francis Dam and that kept him from seeking the advice of others. Because of his sense of “privilege,” say the authors, Mulholland proceeded on his own course. Their final pronouncement was, “William Mulholland bears responsibility for the St. Francis Dam disaster,” something of a stern judgment coming seventy-five years after the event.

  Much of the post-failure analysis makes for compelling reading indeed, but given the facts of Elwood Mead’s original condemnation of the choice of the dam site, the coroner’s pronouncement that the Public Service Commission erred in granting total oversight for the undertaking to one man, and Mulholland’s public acceptance of responsibility, not much that is truly startling has come to light, though it is likely that given the scope of the disaster, debate on the matter will never end. In the contemporary context, the concept of “accident” has lost much of its cogency, and in today’s litigious society, the pronouncement of “human error” being involved in some calamity seems a certain pretext for either bringing criminal charges, or, at the very least, a massive lawsuit. In the aftermath of the “I am not a crook!” era, the very thought of a public official stepping forward to accept personal responsibility for a catastrophic incident seems beyond imagining.

  Despite the continuing controversy and whatever the truth of the statement that Mulholland was not broken by the collapse, the incident marked for all intents and purposes the end of the Chief’s career, a tragic turn for a man who just a few years before had been listed with Thomas Edison and Orville Wright as being among the country’s most respected members of the profession by the American Association of Engineers. On November 14, 1928, some seven months following the coroner’s verdict, the Los Angeles Times carried the news that Mulholland had stepped down on the previous day, a decision that came in the wake of one of his last acts of significance—the order to lower the level of the Mulholland Dam in Weid Canyon by twenty-one feet, to less than half capacity, while tests of its soundness were conducted. (Though no faults were discovered, the reservoir would be drained in 1931 for retrofitting and strengthening, and not reopened until 1934.)

  “It is no secret that the collapse of the St. Francis Dam hastened Mr. Mulholland’s resignation,” the Times story stated. “The tragedy, which was felt keenly by the ‘Chief’ as he is called at the water department, has aged him. After the first shock of the disaster, Mr. Mulholland plunged into the work of repairing the break in the city’s water system,” the report continued, “and has been actively on the job every day since last March 13.”

  With fifty years of service to the water department, and at seventy-three years of age, he would be remembered not only as the builder of the Los Angeles Aqueduct but of a water system that had grown in value from $100,000 to more than $100 million, the story said, with 3,200 miles of mains and 285,000 customers within a city of 440 square miles and 1 million citizens. Water commissioner R. P. Del Valle praised Mulholland for having designed and built the aqueduct, “the boldest and most spectacular engineering work ever undertaken by an American city.” Del Valle also commended Mulholland’s typical foresightedness in leading the fight for the Colorado River Project and went on to say that “No engineering achievement in this country within the past half-century has exceeded in difficulty or merit that of William Mulholland.”

  In December, shortly after Mulholland announced his retirement, the Swing-Johnson Act authorizing Boulder Dam was passed, opening the way for the development of the entire California Southland. In March 1929, Harvey Van Norman took over as head of the newly reorganized Department of Water and Power, the entity that survives to this day. Mulholland was asked to stay on the payroll as a consultant receiving a stipend of $500 a month, a post that he held for nearly seven years.

  Catherine Mulholland has written gracefully of her grandfather’s twilight years, noting that the once loquacious Chief seemed to grow quieter, even as he began to accompany his children and grandchildren on outings that he had never had the time to enjoy before. She remembers one trip to Palm Springs with her own father, Perry, Mulholland’s eldest son, behind the wheel and “Grandpa” dozing in the backseat when they pulled up at the newly opened Desert Inn. When her father returned to the car to announce that rates at the imposing hostelry began at $10 per night, “Grandpa” Mulholland came awake in a trice. “Ten dollars?” he shouted. “Did you tell them we didn’t want to buy the place?”

  In the end, she recalls, the family stayed at a set of decidedly inferior tourist cabins nearby, and the next morning her father and Mulholland were still squabbling over some minor issue when her father jammed the car in reverse and backed over a water hydrant by the motel’s parking lot. There was a crash and a sudden geyser of water into the desert air, and her father went sprinting toward the motel office while her grandfather climbed out of the car to gape helplessly at the scene.

  “Only the excitement and confusion of the scene registered on me then,” she wrote, “but now, years later, the memory of that old man who had been one of the world’s leading hydraulic engineers standing helpless by a broken water pipe outside a tourist cabin in the desert strikes me as one of those consummately ironic moments when the gods play their Olympian jokes and laugh in heartless derision at us mere mortals.”

  In those after-years, her family each summer took an unprepossessing house on the beach at Santa Monica for a month, and her Aunt Rose, still living in the family home, would often bring Mulholland down to visit. He would sit before a bay window and gaze out at where she and the other grandchildren played, Catherine recalls, but, “When we children waved to him from the surf, he did not wave back.”

  In October 1934, Mulholland fell and broke an arm, and the following December, at seventy-nine, he suffered a major stroke that left him paralyzed and unable to swallow solid food. For six months, he battled on, confined to a hospital bed in his own home, tended to by Rose and a day nurse with the perfect surname of Ironsides. Finally, on July 22, 1935, after rousing for a moment to call out some orders that a ship’s lookout might wish to relay to the forecastle, he closed his eyes and rested.

  ONE SOURCE with whom I spoke as I researched Mulholland’s life and works asked point-blank, “Just what side of the controversy surrounding this aqueduct do you intend to come down on?” A question to be expected, granted, though the person asking it was not quite as opinionated as another to whom I divulged the focus of the work. At the news that I was writing about the aqueduct that made Los Angeles possible, she, a New Yorker of the Woody Allen school, quipped, “Oh, it’s a tragedy.”

  Both the question and the comment reminded me of another such project that I undertook some years ago, an account of Sta
ndard Oil cofounder Henry Flagler’s building of a 153-mile railway project from Miami to Key West, destroyed by a hurricane in 1935. That project had not gone unrecorded by historians, and it was not without its own attendant controversies. Flagler was hauled into federal court to defend himself against charges that he was running a forced labor camp, charges that were thrown out before the trial began. One brutal winter shortly following the completion of the Oversea Railway, there was talk of a massive suit against Flagler by storm-beset Great Britons certain that Flagler’s project had forever altered the path of the Gulf Stream.

  But controversies have only one small part of my fascination with such tales wherein one of the most powerful men of an era undertakes a project that most consider impossible and overcomes all obstacles. The attendant and inevitable controversies, the coda of obliterating hurricane or dam collapse, are significant points, without question, but they dangle from the shape of the underlying whole just as individual ornaments depend from a Christmas tree. It is the magnitude, the daring and the import of the whole, that matters.

  It was in that spirit, then, that this writer conceived of having a conversation with Robert Towne, the person who is likely as responsible as anyone for bringing an awareness of William Mulholland and the Owens Valley water into the modern consciousness. There may be a Mulholland Drive, a Mulholland Memorial Fountain, a Mulholland Dam, and even a Mulholland Middle School (est. 1963), but none of those has been the recipient of an Academy Award. Furthermore, a chance comment of Towne’s—to the effect that the turn-of-the-century events referred to in Chinatown constituted a real-life story just as powerful as the fictitious one—had ever after resonated with this writer.

  A synopsis of the film may be in order: in 1937 Los Angeles, tawdry private investigator Jake Gittes is hired by a woman impersonating the wife of Hollis Mulwray, the chief engineer of the Department of Water and Power, to investigate her suspicions that Mulwray is having an affair. Soon after Gittes takes incriminating photographs suggesting that she is correct, those photographs end up in the newspaper, causing a scandal, and weakening the authority of Mulwray, who opposes the building of a proposed new dam that farmers in the San Fernando Valley are clamoring for. Interestingly enough, Mulwray opposes the dam because a previous structure that he built on a similar site collapsed.

  In short order, Mulwray’s body is found in one of his own reservoirs, and Gittes suspects foul play. His investigation leads him to believe that Noah Cross, the former owner of the water company before it was sold to the city, is involved in a plot to create the illusion of a water shortage (water is dumped via sewers into the ocean at night, etc.) so that the new dam will be built, increasing the water supply and increasing the value of San Fernando Valley lands that Cross and his business partners have been buying up on the sly.

  A featured subplot of the film involves Noah Cross’s previous rape of his daughter (played by Faye Dunaway), an act that resulted in the birth of a child, now a teen, who is at once a daughter and a sister to her mother. By the time the film begins, the character played by Ms. Dunaway has married Hollis Mulwray.

  During the course of his investigation, Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) falls in love with Mulwray’s widow, and though he eventually confronts the all-powerful Cross with proof of his actions, it comes to nothing. Gittes is discredited and Mulwray’s widow is killed in a shootout when she tries to flee with her daughter/sister. In the end, Jake is advised by one of his underlings, “Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown,” an echo of advice Gittes himself delivers to a client early on in the film, “You dumb son of a bitch, you gotta be rich to kill somebody, anybody, and get away with it.”

  Even though the word “aqueduct” is scarcely mentioned in the film (and in that instance by Cross, who is explaining his own schemes to Gittes), such disinterested sources as the Internet Movie Data base assert, “The plot is based in part on real events that formed the California Water Wars, in which William Mulholland acted on behalf of Los Angeles interests to secure water rights in the Owens Valley,” thus suggesting how powerful a film can be in reshaping the popular perception of actual events. But in this instance, the point of speaking with Towne was not so much to debate history as to find out what had drawn him, a filmmaker, a storyteller, and a native of Los Angeles, to the contours of a true story from the dimmer halls of history. Or to put it another way, what about this piece of actuality had drawn the interest of a man who could have simply “made it all up?”

  It took some effort, but finally Towne agreed, and he began by confirming that he had indeed grown up on the Palos Verde Peninsula, in San Pedro, once a separate city near the mouth of the Los Angeles River. It was originally an unassuming port district, officially annexed by Los Angeles in 1909, and Towne is quick to point out that anyone who does not call it San Pee-dro marks himself as a rank outsider. Towne, born in 1934, attended Redondo High School and later graduated from Pomona College in Claremont, where he studied English and philosophy with little thought as to whether those were practical fields. “That’s just what interested me,” he says. Today, he lives in Rancho Palos Verdes, only a few miles from San Pedro as the crow flies, if light years away in terms of privilege.

  When asked if he considered himself an Angeleno, given the setting of certain films he is often identified with—in addition to Chinatown and its more modestly received sequel, Two Jakes (focused on real estate and oil, made in 1990), he wrote and directed two other LA-based films, Tequila Sunrise (1988) and Ask the Dust (2006)—Towne replied that he supposes he is, though he did not think much about such things when he was younger. As he was growing up, he thought of himself as a “South Bay” kid, a much more focused identity.

  In any event, and despite the fact that he grew up on the banks of the very river whose vagaries of flow led to the city’s search for alternate water sources at the turn of the twentieth century, Towne claims that he was unaware of the lore surrounding Mulholland’s aqueduct and the controversy surrounding the city’s acquisition of Owens Valley water rights until he was thirty-five and searching for a story of intrigue that could be melded into a 1930s Los Angeles setting.

  At the time of the writing of Chinatown, Towne was still struggling. Despite having done uncredited work on Bonnie & Clyde and The Godfather (he would go on to write Shampoo, Heaven Can Wait, and many more), he was still a relative unknown. Chinatown would become his first original credited work, and though the film would have its fabled popular and critical success, including eleven Oscar nominations, the expectations of Paramount Studios at the time of production were modest. When asked whether he or anyone involved with the production ever expressed any concerns about his introducing actual historical material into a thriller, he laughs.

  “No one was concerned,” he says. “I don’t think anyone I was dealing with thought Los Angeles even had a history.”

  As to the propriety of transposing events that had actually taken place thirty years or more before, Towne says that it did not concern him at all. He points out that violence over the aqueduct’s appropriation of Owens Valley water continued into the late 1920s—and even to the late twentieth century.

  In fact, a recent Los Angeles Times story carried the reminiscences of Mark Berry, a Lone Pine resident who spent thirty days in juvenile detention for dynamiting a section of the aqueduct on a September night in 1976. The following day, someone strapped a stick of dynamite to an arrow and shot it into the Mulholland Memorial fountain, though that charge failed to go off.

  Similarly, one Owens Valley librarian volunteers that any number of her patrons who are rangers on public lands in the area regularly complain that vandals—or protestors, depending on one’s perspective—persist in opening floodgates to dump Owens River water out of its channel short of the Los Angeles diversion point. Furthermore, while his story is obviously fictitious, Towne is unapologetic about his employment of facts: “I consider it historically accurate,” he said, insisting that his script is “based upon the evidence
that a group of influential men from Los Angeles profited greatly from insider knowledge that water would come to the San Fernando Valley.”

  When asked if he has ever heard the tale of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power official attending the film’s premiere and protesting that all had been fabricated with the exception of the “incest,” Towne is amused. He has not heard that story, he claims, but he agrees that it is a good one. Asked where the subplot of Noah Cross’s illicit relationship with his daughter actually came from, he answers without hesitation. “It seemed obvious to me that a man like Cross would rape indiscriminately. He would rape the Owens Valley. He would rape his own daughter. Whatever he wanted he took. The idea simply presented itself to me immediately.”

  Given that any Hollywood production necessarily aims to recoup its daunting costs by appealing to a broad audience, one could wonder what made Towne confident that a controversy nearly three-quarters of a century old, rooted in the convoluted issue of water rights, would strike a chord in the public consciousness. After all, even he has admitted that no major studio would want to deal with a story of Chinatown’s complexity today. “Well, it is a detective story,” he says, “and I will grant that most detective stories deal with far more exotic matters than the ownership of water. But on the other hand, I found the very ubiquity of water in everyone’s lives to be compelling. Everybody needs water. It just seemed to me that I could write a very persuasive story about it.”