California Gold

by John Jakes

  “Filth,” editorialized the Los Angeles Times.

  We need no further outpourings of prurient prose and foreign ideology from Miss Ross, Mr. Norris, or any of their debased deviate cronies who purport to be artists and loyal Californians. Let them ply their trade in the sewers of corrupted Europe.

  Despite this valiant crusade by General Otis to safeguard the morals of others, Californians bought every available copy of Range of Light within a week of publication.

  It became a national best-seller. Every literate person in America knew the name Nellie Ross.

  The wind raged. Yellow dust hid the mountains and attacked the eyes. Mack leaned into it, gritted his teeth, and held his hat, Alex staggering along behind. Mack had picked a devil of a day to trek out to Indio to reveal his latest scheme.

  “Here’s the marker. I bought a hundred acres. Fifty of it goes into date palms, the other fifty we’ll turn into a camp.”

  “Camp, sir? What kind?”

  “For consumptives. People who need the hot dry climate but can’t afford to stay.”

  The blinding dust hid Alex’s immediate reaction.

  From an inner pocket Mack took a folded paper. The screaming wind almost tore it away. “Here are the details and the numbers. We’ll put up tents first, then build regular dormitories. We’ll bring in cows and chickens. Invalids who can afford to pay something will be charged three dollars a week. If they’re indigent, they’ll pay nothing. We must hire at least one doctor, and a professional manager. We’ll set it up on a nonprofit basis.”

  “Why are you doing this, sir?”

  “Because I’ve taken a lot from California and I want to give some back. Thousands of people with tuberculosis come here with nothing but hope to sustain them. We can’t help all of them, but we can help a few.”

  Alex’s stalwart strength finally gave way. He wept.

  “God bless you, Mr. Chance. You are a good man. Such a good man.”

  In Riverside, Mack inspected the groves and went over the books. He spent an evening with Billy Biggerstaff and the manager’s wife and seven children, but their boisterous happiness made him melancholy.

  He went up to Ventura for two days with Haven Ogg, then over to San Solaro, where the Wardlow brothers had completed the water system, and Hazard’s realty company had already brought in twenty-three families. Cottages were under construction, clear water flowed in the canal, and the derricks continued to draw oil out of the earth.

  Back at Villa Mediterranean, he and Alex met with Enrique Potter on a Saturday morning. The attorney, slightly stooped and paunchy now, presented a plat of the Los Angeles region with a webwork of red lines radiating from the center.

  “Here are two more interurban lines Henry Huntington has announced. This one adjoins land that you own outside Redlands. This one cuts right through your property in Whittier. Pacific Electric’s real estate department approached me last week.”

  Mack leaned back and tented his fingers. A warm spring breeze rustled papers on his desk. T. Fowler Haines occupied its customary corner.

  “I bought some of this property because I was sure the city would expand,” he explained to Alex. “You can only go so far west and then you’re swimming. Ed Huntington talked about interurbans at the Bohemian Grove, and that’s when I started buying more land. Since he incorporated P.E. last year, he’s gone faster than I ever dreamed.” Mack rubbed his chin. “Sometimes I feel guilty making money this way. Like one of the SP sharks, profiting from knowing ahead of time where the line will be built.”

  “A quadruple increase in land values is damned good medicine for guilt,” Potter said. “Furthermore, Henry Huntington didn’t coerce you into buying land; you did it on your own initiative. Spare me this Southern Pacific shark business.”

  Mack laughed. “All right. You know my bottom price in each case. Don’t go below it.” Potter checkmarked something on his legal pad. Mack shifted papers. “What about that new acreage in the Cahuenga Valley?”

  The attorney touched a folder. “Here. They’ve accepted your offer. All the documents refer to the incorporated name, Hollywood.”

  “Good work. You two handle the rest.” Mack left the desk and plucked a fancy white felt Stetson from the rack.

  “You’re in a devil of a hurry,” Potter said.

  “There’s a speed-driving exhibition down on the flats. I don’t want to miss it.”

  Henry Ford’s 999 racer tore across the flat, leaving a rooster tail of dust. The noise was formidable. On a 109-inch wheel-base and a chassis painted rust red, the young automobile wizard from Detroit had created a brute machine and stripped it for speed. No bonnet protected the four-cylinder eighty-horsepower engine. The driver steered by tiller from a precarious seat only big enough for one.

  A crowd of about three hundred lined both sides of the road west of Riverside. Some had taken the train from Los Angeles, some had driven carriages, and five had arrived in automobiles, two of them electrics. One gasoline auto belonged to Mack.

  He liked the snappy little runabout with its steering tiller, three-gear lever (two forward, plus reverse), and its one-horsepower engine mounted behind the single seat. The auto, from the Olds Motor Works and thus named “Oldsmobile,” had a smart curved dash, a black lacquer finish, red trim, and rakish brass acetylene lamps. At a top speed of twenty miles per hour, it didn’t go fast enough for him.

  Spectators screamed and cheered as 999 turned around down the road and started back, accelerating for the test mile. Mack jumped up on the seat of Ransom Olds’s little runabout and shouted with the rest.

  The 999 howled across the finish line and the flagman whipped his green flag back and forth. Not the easiest car to steer, the 999 shot along the shoulder, slowing down. Rather than try another turn, the hired driver put on the brakes.

  High on his wooden stand the timekeeper checked his clock. “Time for the measured mile—one minute, eleven and one fifth seconds. A new record for the Ford nine ninety-nine and its demon pilot from Toledo.”

  Pandemonium.

  The driver stopped the racer, stripped off his goggles and leather helmet, and rushed back to the crowd surging to meet him. Only last year, young Barney Oldfield had been racing cycles in Ohio. He began working the crowd with a stubby cigar in his mouth, signing autographs, reveling in the attention.

  Mack left the Olds runabout and spent a few minutes studying the 999. Ford had named the racer for the crack train of the New York Central. Fast driving excited Mack. He needed a faster and more powerful automobile to replace the Locomobile and the Olds. Not a steamer, or an electric; they were rapidly losing out to internal combustion. What should he buy? One of those German machines?

  He was walking back along the dusty road pondering that when he noticed three people approaching: a man with a woman on each arm. The man’s handsome face leaped out.

  Mack had a strong urge to avoid them but he didn’t, instead striding forward with forced good cheer.

  “Wyatt. For God’s sake.”

  Wyatt Paul stopped, his women obediently halting as well. Each held a sleeve of Wyatt’s white linen suit, which was most peculiar, severely cut, with a white dickey and Episcopal collar and a white silk kerchief billowing from the breast pocket. Wyatt Paul looked like a photographic negative of a priest.

  “By heaven. My partner.”

  Wyatt smiled, and the sun put that strange opal blaze in his eyes for a moment. Mack pulled his hand back, annoyed; Wyatt had blandly refused to take it.

  They appraised each other. Wyatt’s tan was darker than ever, yet he didn’t look well. He was still dangerously thin, and white streaks like bird’s wings swept back through the pomaded black hair above his ears. Curiously, his lips seemed fuller, red and womanly. It gave him a disturbing androgynous quality.

  The two young women, both buxom, peered at Wyatt like children awaiting instructions, their high-collared dresses so tight, Mack could see the lines of stays beneath. Corsets cinched in their waists t
o the smallest possible measurement, which in turn put more emphasis on their breasts. Dust clung to chiffon veils tying down their huge velvet Gainsborough hats trimmed with ostrich plumes. Despite this altogether proper attire, they managed to look like whores.

  “Ladies, this is my esteemed partner from San Solaro, James Macklin Chance. This is Deacon Martha. This is Deacon Mary. I remarked to the ladies that you lived near here.”

  “Arlington Heights,” Mack nodded, vaguely uneasy; Wyatt kept track of him. “I presume the bank’s getting your royalties to you regularly?”

  “Indeed. My bookkeepers at the tabernacle post them and hand me a monthly report.”

  Mack swept off his Stetson and wiped his forehead. “Did you say tabernacle?”

  “I did. The Tabernacle of the Sun Universal. We’ve just moved into our new sanctuary in the foothills near Pasadena. Ten acres, and a remarkable building. It’s an octagon—many windows and very few walls. A man named Fowler built some octagonal houses around fifty years ago. He said there was something mystical and healing about the design. Of course it didn’t catch on. He was ahead of his time, and dealing with the general public—and we know what that consists of,” Wyatt said with a little smirk. “Dupes, village idiots, hymn singers—and worse. At any rate, an octagonal building is perfect for us. It fosters openness—the kind of freedom from conventionality that we endorse and encourage.”

  “So you’re a preacher now?”

  “I prefer ‘teacher,’ or ‘spiritual leader.’ ” And Mack heard the old smooth gears mesh, the machinery of charm beginning to grind.

  Wyatt brushed away the hands of his companions and let his own flutter and swoop as he spoke. “I founded what you might call a secular faith. We worship and study the natural forces symbolized by the sun.”

  “Health—healing—wholeness,” Deacon Martha chirped with a vapid smile. Or was it Deacon Mary?

  “We recognize the rightful supremacy of man’s physical side,” Wyatt said. “We cultivate its well-being. We maintain that robust health and completely free expression of biologic drives are the highest form of morality.”

  “That should make your church very popular.”

  The cynicism brought a scowl from Wyatt, but the other deacon chirped, “Oh, yes. We have more than nine hundred communicants already.”

  Mack slowly got over his surprise. Why should he be surprised at all? Wyatt had always been ambitious, amoral, and enormously persuasive. California was a seedbed for strange cults that appeared and vanished as regularly as the green hills of spring.

  “Ladies, wait for me in the carriage,” Wyatt said.

  “But June—” one said.

  “Do as you’re told, sweet.” He smiled and grasped her arm. Her knees buckled and Mack realized he’d hurt her. The other girl supported her as they hurried away, their fine dust ruffles dragging through dirt.

  Still uneasy, Mack said, “If you’re interested in autos, you must be prospering. I’m delighted.”

  “Are you. How generous. As a matter of fact, we’re attracting a lot of rich communicants from Iowa and other states in the Midwest. They find the climate and our doctrine liberating.”

  Suddenly he stepped in close. The sun behind him put a halo around his head. “Is Carla with you?”

  “No. We’re divorced.”

  He stepped back. “You took her away from me, used her—then you disposed of her, is that it?”

  “Come on, Wyatt. That happened years ago.”

  “Bad memories linger, my friend.”

  “We aren’t friends, so stop pretending we are. Carla made her choice; I didn’t force her. As for disposing of her later—she left me. Eagerly, I might say. That should make you feel good. I think we’ve said all we have to say.”

  He tipped his Stetson and walked off.

  “Barney! Barney!” admirers were chanting back along the road as Oldfield posed for a cameraman who ducked under a black drape. “Oldfield, hurrah!”

  The breeze snapped Wyatt’s creased white trousers, soiled now with country dust. Naked hate disfigured his handsome face.

  In the double bed at the hotel, Deacon Mary snored lightly with her cheek on his left arm. Deacon Martha worked diligently at his crotch. “Junie, don’t you like this? Mmm, Junie. June?”

  Indifferent, far away, he fondled her hair. Damn Mack for spoiling the day. Wyatt couldn’t forgive him for stealing Carla.

  Mack’s success enraged him with jealousy. No—not so much Mack’s success as his public personage. James Macklin Chance was a name often seen in the California dailies. J. M. Chance was not only a millionaire, he was a personality.

  Well, goddamn it, Wyatt Junius Paul was on his way to that same pinnacle. He was mining gold from the fools who flocked to the tabernacle. He was riding a cresting wave of his own ingenious devising. He was out in the sun again, after a long dark obscurity that he preferred to forget. Couldn’t…

  When he’d left San Solaro, he started to dip into his oil royalties. He could survive on them, but survival wasn’t enough. He wanted spectacular wealth. Even more than that, he wanted to be known all over California.

  Admired.

  Loved…How, though? For a long time, he couldn’t find the answer. In San Diego, he met and married a tubercular widow. He was tipsy when he proposed, dead drunk when they stood before a justice of the peace. Wyatt helped the woman open a cheap sanitarium-hotel, one of hundreds in the state catering to the one-lung crowd. Her bad health, and the hotel, began to suggest a solution to his dilemma.

  The woman died quickly, as he’d hoped, and he liquidated the hotel, using the capital to bottle the first thousand pints of Sunshine Health Syrup. Cripples and hypochondriacs who bought the slop claimed they were energized, pepped up. They fucking well should have been, considering the raw alcohol and cayenne in his recipe.

  From this medicinal triumph he advanced to a more elaborate one. Living in a shore-side cottage in Santa Barbara, he built the first of his Alpine Inhalation Cabinets. Price: $1,000. He manufactured and sold eleven of them, making money, but he was still anonymous. He wanted the kind of notoriety and prestige J. M. Chance enjoyed.

  One night, frozen from a long swim in the surf and running a fever, he fell asleep and dreamed of his mother in Osage, Kansas, her insane religious faith, her equally insane ideas about health. God, how he wanted to puke from all the oat gruel and graham crackers she forced into his mouth.

  He woke before dawn, listening to the Pacific. His fever inflamed him. But so did a sudden idea, clean and simple and perfect for its purpose as a razor’s sharp edge. Excited, he opened a hoarded brandy bottle. He was drunk by sunrise, drunk and ecstatic. He would combine his mother’s two insane predilections into a single scheme superbly suited to the place, the time, the climate—and all the idiots who came over the mountains wheezing and spitting out bloody gobs from their lungs.

  A church—not of the next world, but this. Headed not by some wild Jew claiming divinity but a man of superior intelligence. A church offering not some wispy chromo dream of an afterlife but the vibrant physical reality of longer lustier life in this one. A church of health.,

  Goddamn Mack Chance for demeaning that vision today with his little looks and remarks. Goddamn him for turning his back, walking away, so respectable and superior in his fine suit and white landlord’s hat.

  And goddamn him most for stealing Carla.

  “Bad memories linger. Oh yes they do.”

  “What did you say, Junie?”

  “I said I love you, Deacon Martha.”

  “Junie,” she giggled, “sometimes I think you’re just crazy.”

  He yanked her hair.

  “You pig-brained bitch. Put your head down and do your work.”

  50

  IN THE SPRING OF 1903, Mack fell into conversation with Fremont Older at the Olympic Club. Older was managing editor of the San Francisco Bulletin. Ink for blood, they said of him. He’d risen through the ranks as a tramp printer and reporte
r, an admirer of Hearst and Hearst’s sensational style. He was a huge man with a grenadier mustache and a passion for fine clothes and cigars, with eyes like searchlights and a lumpy bald pate. Wags around town said the lumps came from banging his head against the wall behind his desk. He banged his head over a weak headline or a grammatical gaffe. He banged his head over municipal corruption, which he abhorred. Sometimes he banged his head over things in general.

  “I like your editorials about Schmitz,” Mack said after he introduced himself.

  “Thank you. Glad to hear it. Have a drink. Have a cigar.” Mack took one and thanked him. Older then said, “So you agree this administration’s rotten—”

  “Ever since the Perkins election, you can hardly escape the stench.” To return its tame dog George Perkins to the U.S. Senate, the SP Political Bureau had been forced to deal with Abe Ruef, who controlled four key votes in Sacramento necessary for Perkins’s reappointment.

  “That’s only one symptom of the malady, one small symptom. There’s an evil sickness spreading through this town, Mr. Chance. I love San Francisco. I won’t see it poisoned and left to die.”

  “Really that bad, Mr. Older?”

  “I’ll tell you how bad. Abe Ruef’s turned City Hall into a mart in which everything’s for sale: permits, votes, favors. Schmitz is a puppet, a nobody. Ruef runs things—from his law office, the Pup, his hip pocket. He throws the unions a bone now and then. Otherwise he ignores them. The corporations kiss his fundament and slip him a thousand or two every month to make sure they win franchises and municipal contracts. Now he’s moving into the underworld.”

  “That I didn’t know.”

  “The saloon owners put their advertising where he tells them to put it. They don’t run it in the Bulletin, I assure you. He’s making inroads in prostitution. It’s all covert, hardly visible to the ordinary citizen, but it’s poisonous.”

  “What are you going to do about it?”

  “More of what I’m doing already—editorials, exposés. The facts are hard to dig out. Ruef chums around with important men, and I’ve been threatened. Our publisher Mr. Crothers has been threatened.”