And it was not long after the Ford wedding that the Jack Murrays’ daughter Constance announced her decision to become a Holy Child nun. In Catholic society, there are generally two reasons given for a girl’s decision to enter a convent. Either a girl has very few young men friends or she has so many beaux that she cannot decide among them. In Connie Murray’s case, her mother announced to the press that “She has a true vocation.” At the time, the Daily News noted that she “graciously gave in to her family” and made her debut before taking the veil. Whatever the true reasons for her decision may have been, there were those who suggested that she wished to become a nun “to atone for the sins of her relatives.”
Part Two
THE WHEELER-DEALERS
Chapter 9
“MA AND PA D.”
For all their feuds and fallings-out—and the occasional eruptions of bad press—families like the Murrays and McDonnells and Cuddihys strove earnestly to achieve an aura of respectability to accompany their wealth. They wanted to be regarded as “kindly people.” They also wanted to be honest and churchgoing and devout, daily communicants. Because they were aware of the Irishman’s reputation for drunkenness, they were teetotalers or, at the most, cautious drinkers. They conducted themselves in much the same way as the “Uptown” German Jews—Schiffs, Loebs, Lehmans, and Warburgs—anxious to develop a proper self-image and to define themselves as against the Lower East Side “newcomers” from the shtetl of Eastern Europe. Even such families as the Joseph P. Kennedys cared enough about being accepted socially to move out of Boston, where they knew they could never make the grade, and follow the example of the Murrays and McDonnells and come to New York, where they settled in Bronxville and where the Kennedy daughters made society debuts, and the Kennedy sons were invited to all the best parties. But, at the same time, there were other Irish-Americans who cared less about probity and the impact they made on society, and who concentrated almost single-mindedly on amassing huge fortunes. One of the most successful of these entrepreneurs was Mr. Edward L. Doheny.
Born in 1856 in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, the son of a poor Irish immigrant who had headed westward in a vain search for success, Ed Doheny ran away from home at the age of sixteen and worked, variously, as a booking agent, a fruit packer, a mule driver, and a waiter in the Occidental Hotel in Wichita, Kansas. At the age of eighteen he began what was to be his life-long occupation—searching for wealth underground—and became a gold prospector. He wandered about Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and Mexico, sometimes striking it rich, sometimes going broke. It was a rough-and-tumble existence in the one-street towns of the Southwest, and Doheny developed a reputation as a rough-and-tumble character. He had learned early how to use a gun, and was quick to reach for his holster in tough situations, and it was rumored that he had once killed a man—or possibly several. In New Mexico, Doheny was known as the man who had cleaned up the little town of Kingston of local cattle thieves and bad men, one of whom was said to have fired sixteen bullets at him before Doheny was able to disarm and overpower him. As a prospector, however, he employed more mystical methods and, for a while, his principal mining tool was a divining rod. When the rod quivered and dipped in his hand, Doheny stopped on the spot and began digging for gold, sometimes finding it and sometimes not.
In 1892, when he was thirty-six years old and when prospects for discovering a real bonanza had begun to look exceptionally dim, Ed Doheny turned up in the still-raw city of Los Angeles. His mining adventures in Arizona and New Mexico had all lost money, and he was virtually penniless. But then one of those strokes of incredible luck that have marked the beginnings of so many American fortunes occurred to Ed Doheny. Passing in the street one day, he noticed a black man driving a horse and wagon-load of black, tarry stuff. Doheny asked the man what the substance was, and was told that it was “brea”—Spanish for pitch—and that it bubbled from a pit on the edge of town, and that the poorer families of the city collected it and used it for fuel. From his diggings around the West, Doheny knew enough to recognize the brea as crude oil, and set off to investigate the bubbling pit. He located it in Hancock Park, decided it looked promising, and, with a small amount of hastily borrowed cash, leased the land. Within a few months he had brought in one of the first gushers ever to flow in the city of Los Angeles. Armed with this success, he went on to drill other wells in other parts of California and, within five years’ time, practically controlled the entire oil production in the state.
He next turned to Mexico, where he had prospected as a young man, this time in search of oil, not gold. He found profitable lands in the jungles beyond Tampico and leased over a million acres there. His Mexican Petroleum Company cleared the jungle, built roads and railroads, docks, pipelines, shops and houses for laborers and, from lavish bribes to Mexican officials, earned the intense good favor of the Mexican Government. By 1922 Doheny’s income from his Mexican company alone netted him $31,575,937, and his total worth was reported to be more than a hundred million dollars. By 1925 he was reliably reported to be even richer than “the richest man in America,” John D. Rockefeller.
As a rich man, Edward L. Doheny, former Southwestern gunman, affected a monocle, a walrus mustache, British tailoring, and an autocratic manner. He also became devoted to prodigious spending, and bought a large portion of what is now downtown Los Angeles which he converted into a vast park and estate called “Chester Place.” His yacht, the Casiana, was one of the most luxurious in the country. He surrounded himself with an entourage of servants and bodyguards, and “Chester Place” was so heavily protected that once, when a fire broke out in one of the many buildings on the estate, the Los Angeles Fire Department had difficulty getting through the security at the main gate. His second wife, who had been his secretary, was decked out in ropes of sapphires, emeralds, diamonds, and rubies. Mr. Doheny was not particularly philanthropic, but he did contribute heavily to the Irish Freedom Movement and to the Democratic Party. In fact, it was probably his wife, who was shrewder about the handling of money than her husband, who was responsible for conserving Ed Doheny’s fortune, and for seeing to it that it was not all spent as rapidly as it was made. Once, surveying a gathering of her children and stepchildren, “Ma D.,” as she was called, commented, “None of them would have anything if it weren’t for me. I’m responsible for every penny they have, right down to that big diamond ring on Lucy’s finger.”
Ma D. was the undisputed empress of “Chester Place.” She had been made a Papal Countess and enjoyed using the formal title, “Countess Estelle Doheny.” Physically, she resembled Queen Victoria—small, ugly, and imperious, with a decidedly Victorian manner. At “Chester Place,” one descended a long, wide marble staircase lined with footmen and maids to be ushered into the presence, or Presence, of Ma D. Though she became almost totally blind, one was never permitted to comment on, or to remind her of, her infirmity, and small, carpeted ramps were built across the thresholds of doorways and up steps so that Ma D. could move through the rooms of her house unaided. For all her grand ways, Ma D. had a middle-class American’s love of showing off her home to visitors, leading her guests along the vast marble corridors, into the Pompeian Room where she pointed out the vaulted ceiling covered with gold leaf and her priceless collection of antique watches, into the conservatory which was big enough to contain tall trees as well as her prize-winning collection of orchids. For her dining table, a long silver centerpiece was created just to contain the specimen orchids, which were changed daily. Before each meal, Ma D. memorized the name of each variety of orchid up and down the centerpiece so that she could recite to her guests the names of the blooms which she could not see. Inevitably, each tour of the house ended with an elevator ride up two stories to Ma D.’s private chapel with its magnificent reliquary and where the Eucharist was reserved. Outside the chapel entrance stood two tall Spanish armoires filled with hats and scarves in a variety of styles and colors from which ladies could choose in order to cover their heads before going inside.
On the other hand, whatever philanthropies are associated with the Doheny name in California are largely attributable to Ma D. These include an eye hospital named after her, a Catholic church which she built in Adams Street, Los Angeles, and the Doheny Library at the University of Southern California.
One of Pa D.’s cronies from his prospecting days was a young fellow from Kentucky named Albert Bacon Fall. Like Doheny, Fall had had little formal education and a checkered career after heading west as a youth. Fall had worked as a cowboy, a farmhand, a prospector, and a miner, and had wound up in New Mexico when it was still a territory and where, after studying law in his spare time, he had settled, been admitted to the bar, and gone into politics. He had been an early supporter of President Grover Cleveland, and the latter had rewarded him by appointing him to be a judge of the Supreme Court of the Territory of New Mexico. It was here that Fall and Doheny first met, and became card-playing friends and drinking companions. But, as a judge, Fall had a tendency to take the law into his own hands, as happened one day when he leaped down from the bench to lead a posse that was out to lynch a bandit. When word of this escapade reached President Cleveland’s ears, Fall was summarily removed from his judicial post.
Unlike his friend Doheny, Albert Fall never had the luck to strike it rich. With the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, Fall joined the infantry, rose to the not particularly exalted rank of captain and, at the war’s end, came home to New Mexico and announced that he had switched his allegiance from the Democratic to the Republican Party. When New Mexico was admitted to the Union in 1912, Albert Fall ran for and was elected New Mexico’s first United States Senator.
As a Senator, Albert Fall provided Washington with almost a caricature of the Western hombre. He had cold blue eyes and thin lips from which a large cigar usually drooped. He spoke with a drawl and wore wide-brimmed hats and shoestring neckties. A Washington newspaperman wrote of him, “With a long drooping moustache, he looks like a stage sheriff of the Far West in the movies. His voice is always loud and angry. He has the frontiersman’s impatience. From his kind lynch law springs.” Though Fall represented the opposite side of the political fence from his friend Doheny, the two men had a number of beliefs in common. Both were strong advocates—Doheny with particularly good reasons—of armed intervention in Mexico to protect American investments there. Both were also ardently in favor of the immediate and complete exploitation by private interests, such as Doheny’s, of the nation’s natural resources, such as oil. In the Senate, because he spoke a little Spanish, Albert Fall presented himself as an expert on Mexican affairs. Also in the Senate, Fall became a card-playing chum of the easygoing Republican Senator from Ohio, Warren Gamaliel Harding. When, in 1920, Harding became one of the unlikeliest Presidential candidates in American history, Albert Fall was one of his staunchest supporters. So, at Fall’s urging, was Ed Doheny, who contributed $25,000 to the Harding campaign, and paid for national newspaper advertising which featured full-page photographs of Harding’s mother and father—designed to counteract rumors to the effect that Harding had “Negro blood,” in addition to his more obvious shortcomings.
When Harding was elected to office by an overwhelming majority—carrying thirty-seven of the forty-eight states—Harding asked Fall if he would like to be his Secretary of the Interior. Harding had originally considered Fall for Secretary of State, but had been persuaded by his advisers that the Senate would not approve a Southwesterner for the top Cabinet post. In offering Interior to Fall, Harding apologized for not giving him the bigger job. Fall, on the other hand, was not at all disappointed. Interior was known as one of the Cabinet positions most susceptible to graft, and where important money could be made on the side. It was also rumored at the time that Interior was “owned” by the nation’s big oil interests. Fall’s appointment was greeted with cheers and applause on both sides of the Senate floor, and Fall went sweeping into the job without the usual formality of having the appointment sent to committee. Of his Cabinet appointments Harding had announced that he was picking “the best man” for each job, and the New York Times replied editorially that the new President was obviously appointing not the best men but his best friends.
About three years before Harding’s election, Ed Doheny had had another meeting that was to prove fateful. His son, Edward L. Doheny, Jr., was a young lieutenant in the Navy assigned to the U.S.S. Huntington, and while the Huntington was in Pensacola Harbor, the vacationing Mr. Doheny came aboard to visit him. While on board, the oil millionaire was invited to the quarters of the ship’s commanding officer, one Captain John Keeler Robison. The visit lasted for about two hours, and the main topic of conversation was, naturally, oil. Oil was of vital importance to the Navy. Nearly all its vessels had been converted from coal- to oilburning, and to ensure that the fleet would have a ready supply of fuel in cases of emergency—and fuel that could be obtained at much lower cost than if it were bought on the open market—the Navy Department, under President Taft, had been given some 78,791 acres of oil lands situated in three principal locations: at Elk Hills and Buena Vista Hills, both in Kern County, California, and at Teapot Dome in Natrona County, Wyoming. Ever since the Taft order, private oil interests, including Doheny’s, had been trying to obtain leases to drill and exploit this highly valuable acreage, but had thus far been successfully resisted by the Naval Fuel Oil Board, which had maintained that the land should be kept strictly by the Navy and strictly for Navy use. Captain Robison, an Annapolis man and a career naval officer, may not have known much about oil wells, but he was proud of his Navy, and he commented to Mr. Doheny that he thought the Navy was doing a pretty good job in keeping and maintaining its precious oil reserves. Doheny gave the Captain a little smile and said, “Well, it is being handled very well for the people you have for neighbors. But you are not going to have any property there in a very few years.” Captain Robison asked him what he meant by that, and Doheny explained that neighboring oil companies, operating on the periphery of the Navy lands, were rapidly pumping out oil that was “leaking” from the Navy oil fields into other fields nearby. Doheny depicted the invisible situation underground as one of a series of huge bathtubs with interconnecting drains. When oil ran out of one tub, it simply drained in from the next.
Captain Robison was aghast at this news. It opened his eyes, he said later, to a problem that he had never dreamed existed. Testifying before a Senate investigating committee, Robison said that Mr. Doheny’s words carried particular weight because they did not come “from some $2,500 clerk,” but from a man “who had made millions knowing how.” He assured the Senators, “That is the kind of information I believe.”
The meeting aboard the Huntington had been an exceptionally fruitful one. When Harding became President, he appointed Edwin Denby as his Secretary of the Navy, replacing Josephus Daniels, who had served under Wilson. Denby’s chief qualification for the Cabinet post seemed to be that he had served as a Marine in the First World War. Denby then placed none other than Captain John Keeler Robison in the post of Chief of the Navy’s Bureau of Engineering, and put him in complete charge of the naval petroleum reserves, with the temporary rank of rear admiral.
The problem of “drainage,” meanwhile, was not at all a new one to Navy petroleum engineers. It had been studied under Secretary Daniels, and it had been concluded that while a certain amount of drainage might occur in certain areas of certain fields, the situation was nowhere near as
dire as Doheny had painted it to Captain Robison. There was no danger of the Navy’s oil simply leaking away. The pressure from private oil interests to obtain leases on Navy land had also been applied upon Secretary Daniels, and, in June, 1920, Daniels had been persuaded to ask Congress for authority to lease to private operators certain Navy lands where “important” drainage might be apt to occur. Congress passed the act, but the small amount of the appropriation—$500,000—was an indication that Congress had not intended to open up the Navy lands to complete exploitation. Under Daniels, only a very few leases were granted to private companies. Still, under the Wilson administration the door to exploitation had been opened a crack. Under Harding, with Edwin Denby as Secretary of the Navy and Albert Fall as Secretary of the Interior, oil men like Doheny saw a chance to push it fully open. But, Fall explained to his friend Doheny, it was a question of first things first. If Fall was going to do his best job for his friends in the petroleum industry, it was important that he, Fall, first get control of the naval oil reserves into the hands of his own department, which he intended to run as a one-man operation. To do this, he would have to go to work on Denby. Even more important, he would have to go to work on his friend the President. With neither man did Fall foresee any real difficulty.
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