“You’re one of the judges,” she said, putting out her cigarette on the boardwalk. “Should we be talking?”
“The contest is over. I’m Eddie Mull.”
“Thank you for your vote. The others didn’t seem to agree.”
He laughed. “They wore sunglasses. Maybe they couldn’t see well.”
“Did you try to persuade them?”
“Well, it’s not like a jury. We didn’t consult. Frankly, I wondered what some of those girls were doing in a beauty contest.”
She frowned. She was a wholesome-looking girl with thick brownish hair, feminine without glamor, the healthiest-looking girl in the contest he thought, something earthy that appealed to a Salinas ranch boy like him. The lemonades came.
“Say, how do you think that makes me feel?”
“Oh, I didn’t mean it like that.”
“How did you mean it?”
“I meant it as a compliment. That’s why I voted for you. Say, don’t you have clothes somewhere. Maybe I can give you a ride. What’s your name, anyway, Number Seven?”
She didn’t answer right away. She has something, Eddie thought, though clearly is wary. Maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned clothes.
“Why do you want to know?”
“Shouldn’t I know the name of the girl I voted for?”
“Okay, I’m Cornelia, Nelly for short. Nelly Sinclair. Now you know.”
“Where you from?’
“Iowa, like I told the mayor. Couldn’t stand the cold.”
“You’ve come to the right place.”
“Haven’t we all.”
“How’d you happen to get in the contest?”
“Just came down.”
“You got a job?”
“Say, are all the judges this curious?”
“Is it a crime?”
“I’m at Woolworth’s.”
“What do you do at Woolworth’s?”
“What do I do? What does everybody do at Woolworth’s? I’m in sales, ladies’ stockings to be specific.”
“How would you like to work for me?”
Chapter 4
Water and sunshine weren’t the only things bringing people to Los Angeles. The second California gold rush began in Los Angeles, and this time the gold was black. La Brea tar pits, oozing tar and dinosaur bones along the place one day to be called Wilshire Boulevard, were a clear sign oil was down there somewhere. A failed gold prospector named Ed Doheny who’d come to town before the water was not the first person to drive a stake in the ground near Rancho La Brea, but he was the first to get down past the tar to the less viscous stuff that shot a hundred feet into the air and got a few streets named after him.
Like Ed Doheny, H. H. Callender, a Scot, had worked his way west digging here and there for this and that, ending up as far west as he could go, planting his spade one more time and coming up dry. Eddie met him at another Ocean Park beauty contest on Lick Pier, on another hot summer Saturday. He was a married man by now with a second baby on the way and didn’t hang around after the contests anymore chatting with contestants. Callender approached him as he left the pier, said he had a business proposition.
Eddie Mull had established a reputation, was often approached by people he didn’t know and often listened. Some of the listening was a waste of time, someone claiming inside information on this or that, land or water or zoning, real estate specialties. Eddie learned to listen just long enough to get the gist and get away without being rude if there was nothing in it. This time, for some reason, he lingered, something in the way the man talked, something honest in the pale blue eyes and grizzled face that made an impression. And it didn’t hurt that he had a good Scotch-Irish name like Callender. Eddie invited him for a cup of coffee.
They strolled the strand, pushing through the weekend crowd and settling in the shade of a shop that looked out on the beach. Eyeing a pyramid of oranges, Eddie ordered coffee and oranges for two. Callender looked like he could use some vitamins. In the distance, heads bobbed and surfers rode the breakers. Heatwaves wiggled up from sand that was mostly a blanket of towels and umbrellas. In front of them, along the strand, flâneurs passed, men in boaters, women in sunhats, children pulling on saltwater taffy and doughy pretzels. From next door came the sound of baseballs striking metal bottles and farther down sharp pings from a shooting gallery. Eddie was enjoying himself, pleased he’d not rushed back to the office, content to slow down for a few minutes and savor his very successful life. Lick Pier had been good to him before, why not give it another chance. He glanced at his odd-looking coffee companion and waited for the pitch. If he could have seen into the future he might not have waited, but that is not certain. In any case, no voice spoke to him.
“Yes sir, Mr. Mull,” the man said when their order arrived, “I believe I’m on to something. Not for the first time either.”
Eddie peeled his orange, sipped his coffee, which had almost no taste, and listened to Callender’s stories of digging for silver in Nevada, copper in Arizona and gold in Mexico. For all his digging, he looked like a man who had washed out. Watching him lick his knife, Eddie figured he’d misjudged the man. He was ready to leave when Callender finally came to the point. It involved digging for oil in a place called Venice-by-the-Sea. He went on in some detail. Eddie didn’t leave.
“It is guaranteed.”
There wasn’t much guaranteed in Los Angeles, but Eddie had sold some lots in Venice-by-the-Sea and knew something about the place, the brainchild of an easterner named Abbot Kinney who’d come west for his health and sought to do something with money he’d inherited, which came from tobacco, which was the cause of his health problems, though he didn’t know it. He purchased a large tract south of Ocean Park and began building the New Venice, as he called it, complete with imitations right down to canals, arched footbridges, hanging palazzi and gondolas imported from Italy. For gondoliers, he used Mexicans.
Then he died.
“We buy Kinney’s land, bring in the oil and we’ll be rich as Doheny.”
“How do you know about any of this?”
“Worked for Kinney.”
“Who else knows?”
“No one for sure—only me. Now you.”
On the pier the Ferris wheel turned and the roller-coaster swooshed. Callender had taken off his faded Stetson, and his bald head shone in the light. Droplets of sweat glistened in his luxurious black mustache. Eddie found himself pulled in opposing directions. The man was preposterous, his stories belied by his appearance. Yet who’s to say?
“Why me?” Eddie asked.
“Your name’s Mull, right? I go to the Reverend Willie’s church. I am a Soldier for God. You’re his brother.”
That wasn’t good enough. “Why not a bank?”
“No collateral but my good name.”
“And you think there’s oil down there?”
“Just like Long Beach,” he said, blue eyes bright. “Signal Hill—sand, clay, bitumen, oil, it all adds up. And Santa Fe Springs, you heard about that strike, I reckon.”
“You know your stuff, eh?”
“Know oil soil when I see it.”
“How come nobody else does?”
“Couldn’t answer that.”
“Land’s for sale?”
“Kinney’s estate.”
“Asking?”
“Negotiable, not many people looking for mucky canals.”
Eddie was sizing up his man. Was this another sign, another tip? He could never explain what had happened outside Joe Sartori’s bank, didn’t even try, but it had changed his life. He’d thought of telling Willie, but never did. Willie would have gotten biblical, and Eddie hated that. He’d gotten a sign and played it. The trick was always in deciding if the sign was any good. That’s where instinct came in.
“You bring up oil there,” he s
aid, “and you turn the canals to goo. All those pretty houses will be sticky black in a week. That means lawsuits.”
“Nope, creative destruction,” said Callender. “Happens every day down here. Gold destroyed the Sierra Mountains, copper destroyed the Arizona desert, L.A. destroyed Owens Valley, automobiles destroying the streetcars. Think about it. At Armageddon everything down here gets destroyed.”
“Down here?”
“You know what I mean. Make way for the Second Coming, the New Jerusalem. Don’t you listen to your brother?”
One of Willie’s Soldiers all right, Eddie thought—blunt, uneducated, mud on his boots (maybe oil), knows his Bible, ageless, probably younger than he looks, old hat, frayed suit probably the only one he owns. Strange eyes.
“You sure you haven’t talked to anyone else?”
“You’re the first. Seen those Mull real estate signs of yours all over town. Then, as I said, knowing you’re your brother’s brother, a holy man, means a lot to me. Had to find someone I could trust seeing as how I found the place but need the stake.”
“What’s to keep me from buying it on my own?”
“Like I said, your name’s Mull. Like your brother. Trust you just like I trust him. Family thing, ain’t it?
Eddie thought about that. He put a dollar down, watched the waiter take it and leave a few coins in change. He picked up the coins.
“We strike, we go fifty-fifty,” said Callender.
Eddie chuckled, amused to be dividing up invisible profits. “Why not? Say, what do people call you?”
“I’m called Henry.”
“Henry, let’s take a drive.”
“One other thing,” said Callender, standing. “Let me tell you what I’m going to do with the money.”
“Already spending it, eh?”
“I’m going to build your brother the biggest church this town ever saw—a temple rising so far into the sky you can see it in the next county. Willie Mull is the voice of God in this godless place, and I want his message to reach every sinner who breathes the glorious air of this great city.”
Eddie had his man pegged from the start, though Callender didn’t. He purchased five square miles of empty beaches and marshes from the Kinney estate just south of the canals, between Venice and the place called Playa del Rey, a large investment financed following a visit to Security Trust. Eddie sometimes sat next to Joe Sartori at L.A. Chamber of Commerce meetings. They were pals.
They brought in drillers to put down one test well after another. They spent days watching the hammers bang deeper into the sand, one thousand feet, two thousand feet, nothing coming up but salty sand and tar. At two thousand feet, Eddie was ready to call it off. There was always a risk of an empty hole. The more you drill, the more you lose. Callender was always there, and the little man had begun to annoy him, marching around in his mucky boots like he owned the place, dowsing the land with his stick like a mystic with his wand. Eddie was sick of the whole thing, sore at himself for taking advice from a crackpot, sore at himself for having agreed to go fifty-fifty, though it looked like that wasn’t going to matter.
“Give it a half mile,” said Callender, catching the drift.
“Easy for you to say,” said Eddie, “You don’t pay the crews.”
“Have to go a half mile—you don’t, someone else will.”
Why not? At two thousand, they were almost there.
When Venice #1 blew, oil shot ten stories into the sky, higher they said than Doheny’s spout at La Brea, covering one square mile of Kinney’s canals with gooey spray. It was the same with #2 and #3 and the subsequent wells. Venice wasn’t Signal Hill and wasn’t Santa Fe Springs, but there was oil a-plenty down there and before long they had fifty derricks pumping and had paid off all the homeowners who wanted to sue but knew that no judge was going to penalize someone for bringing in oil or water—not in Los Angeles. Having slept in a tent on the sand for three weeks, Eddie went home nearly as black as the oil. Up to the day of the blow, he’d been a successful real estate man, rising maybe faster than some others who’d arrived with the water, but not as fast as he wanted.
Oil changed everything for him. It took time to get rich on water: You had to find the land, borrow the money, develop the property and hope you sold enough houses to get back enough to pay the bank and start over again. Oil, on the other hand, was ready cash. It came up as fast as it went out. In the tarry sands of Venice Beach, with a little more help from the good fairy he’d found at Security Trust on Fifth Street, Eddie had what he wanted.
The problem was that Henry Callender wanted it, too.
Chapter 5
The Mull girls were born independent. Was it because Mother, who didn’t nurse, was so uninspiring and Dad couldn’t be bothered, or was it something innate, like the X factor, the genetic alleles that make us unique? Margaret, called Maggie, came first, followed by Elizabeth, called Lizzie, a year later. With two girls to look after, Nelly moved the family from Mull Gardens, which in her opinion was too common, to snappy Bel Air, an elegant new community in the hills above Westwood, built by a rancher, who, like Eddie, had struck oil—his in Santa Fe Springs. Willie moved into a rented bungalow in West Hollywood to be near his church, and Cal joined his aunt, uncle and little cousins in Bel Air rather than share another house with his father, who was rarely home.
Cal was the brother the girls didn’t have and wouldn’t have, for after Lizzie the doctor said there’d be no more babies. It was a shock, for Nelly thought of herself as the perfect physical specimen, which is why she hadn’t nursed. Cal became the son she didn’t have and Nelly the mother he didn’t have. He was a pleasant and helpful boy, as if something in his unconscious had been touched by the misery he’d seen from his mother’s backpack in the dingy alleyways of Shanghai. Willie said that Cal’s good nature came from Chun hua, who nursed him (and Willie, too), teaching them something of Chinese endurance and stoicism. Cal was born “in the Tao,” Chun hua used to say, an obscure Oriental idea Willie never fully understood.
For a while, Nelly tried to raise her daughters like other little rich girls in Bel Air, dressing them in cute pastel dresses for school and bows and pinafores for dance lessons at the Wilshire Ebell. The girls wouldn’t have it. They were aided by Cal, their chief babysitter and confederate. He was in the eighth grade his first year in Bel Air, Maggie and Lizzie starting kindergarten and nursery school. Sometimes he caught the school bus down the hill, but often Nelly drove the three of them down together.
On her own, Lizzie, the younger, might have bent to her mother’s schemes, but Maggie pulled her along in her draft. She was a gritty, outdoorsy kind of girl who preferred boys to girls and loved competition. When she was seven they got her a horse, named Dynamite, which they boarded at stables at Playa del Rey. A year later Lizzie got her horse, too. Nelly hated everything about horses—the dust, the smells, the flies, the shit—and soon was employing Cal to chaperone the girls on the trolleys that stopped in Playa del Rey on their way down the coast to Redondo beach. At fifteen, Cal got a driver’s permit and new responsibilities as the girls’ chauffeur. Nelly was more than happy to turn her car over to him. Riding days conflicted with her bridge days.
For Cal, a nature boy, Playa del Rey was love at first sight. A beachy village at the foot of a long sandy hill overlooking a vast area of marshes and dunes, it was home to every species of waterfowl known to Southern California. He’d take his bicycle along, and while the girls rode horses peddled the twisty hill streets with their view from Point Dume to Catalina Island. On foot he prowled the marshes of Ballona Creek. If he lifted his sights over the wetlands toward Venice, he could see the dozens of derricks Uncle Eddie had sunk into the marshy lands that once were part of Abbot Kinney’s dream. He hated the sight and so didn’t look.
For his sixteenth birthday, Eddie bought him a red Ford roadster. Twice a week he’d load his bike in the back, the gir
ls in the front and head down Roscomare Road across Sunset to Wilshire and Sepulveda and on west to the stables, on the road soon to be named Culver. He graduated from high school that June and would start at USC in the fall but had two months to explore the city in his new car. It was a summer the cousins would never forget, the summer they spent every day together, free of adults, who were just as happy to be free of them.
The girls loved the roadster. Top down, they would shout over the wind as they motored along the open roads. Maggie was the daredevil, loving speed and urging Cal to go faster, faster, always faster, while Lizzie sat taking everything in and shouting questions to the chauffeur. You could already see the adult in both girls. Maggie could not resist a challenge or a dare. Lizzie would laugh at her sister and go back to making the mental notes she would later write in her diary. She started a diary at age six, and the time would come years later when they were auctioned off. She was as competitive as her sister, but in a different way. Maggie needed to test herself against others and dominate. Lizzie’s competition was with herself. The goal was to get down in writing the precise words that represented her precise thoughts, get them down before they flew away forever.
One day Cal decided to head home from the stables through Venice. Normally, he returned the way he’d come—east toward Culver City, north on Centinela, east again on Wilshire or Sunset to Bel Air, sometimes taking detours into the Santa Monica Mountains for excursions through the canyons. He knew about Venice because Eddie never stopped talking about it, explaining how he’d turned the canals built by Abbot Kinney into oil fields because that’s the price of progress, creative destruction he called it. Lawsuits brought against Mull Oil had been thrown out by every judge because oil was making everyone in Los Angeles rich, including the judges, including the people whose canal houses now looked out on muck and derricks, people happy to be sharing in the oil bonanza.
He took the bridge northward across Ballona Creek and turned off Pacific Avenue, the main north-south road through Venice to Santa Monica, onto a parallel access road running along the ocean, called, strangely enough, “Speedway.” Quickly the bright sunlight was gone, obscured by a forest of gigantic steel trees. They bounced along the potted, tar-splattered asphalt, listening for the crash of breakers but hearing only the sucking of pumps. There were no other cars, no other people. A mile or so along, he stopped by a “no trespassing” sign and glanced at the girls, both strangely quiet. Maggie was squirming. Lizzie had come up on her knees and was turning her head like a camera on a pivot. They got out to walk.
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