Two years later J.I. drew up a trust instrument by which he established the James Irvine Foundation “to provide aid for educational and charitable institutions which were privately supported”; no institution receiving public funds was eligible for aid. J.I. was a fierce believer in private enterprise. Earlier, in the 1930s, he had handsomely endowed the ailing Santa Ana Community Hospital, to insure that it would be maintained as a private hospital, not one that was government-subsidized, but that was also nonsectarian and nonprofit. To guarantee that the Irvine Foundation would have the final say in the Irvine Company’s business, he specifically deeded to it a majority share of the company’s stock. And to make sure that neither Myford nor Big Kate would control the foundation after his death, J.I. specified that the foundation be directed by four old friends, Loyall McLaren, Robert Gerdes, Arthur McFadden, and James G. Scarborough.
One summer day in 1947, J.I. and his general ranch manager, William Bradford Hellis, who had been working for Irvine since the age of twenty, and a real estate broker friend named Walter Tubach journeyed to Montana for a fishing trip at J.I.’s ranch, which he had named the Flying D. The three men roamed up and down the icy stream, and as Hellis and Tubach explained later, the three became separated. Eventually Hellis and Tubach found each other, but J.I. was still missing. When they found him at last he was floating face down in the river. The coroner’s verdict was that he had died of natural causes, and, after all, he was then eighty years old. But some members of his family were never satisfied with that explanation. He had been in splendid health and was an expert mountain fisherman. He knew every rock and gorge of his Montana property as well as he knew his California land. And a few days earlier he had refused to lend Brad Hellis two hundred thousand dollars.
The presidency of the Irvine Company fell to Myford Irvine, who was then forty-nine, and Brad Hellis, who had been Mike Irvine’s boyhood friend, was made second in command. But Mike Irvine, who knew next to nothing about agriculture, gladly turned the reins over to Hellis, and for the next ten years—in a style as imperial as old J.I.’s—Hellis ruled the Irvine ranch. Then suddenly, under circumstances in which, as we shall see, many troubling questions were raised, Hellis resigned.
Without Brad Hellis at his side Mike Irvine seemed to fall apart. He appeared to be having some sort of nervous breakdown. There was talk in the family of huge gambling debts incurred at Las Vegas and of threats from underworld figures, suggesting that he was entangled in a land deal involving the future site of Caesars Palace. In January 1959, Mike Irvine, in an agitated state, told the family that he had to raise $6,500,000 and that he needed at least $400,000 of that sum immediately. He was, he said, “sitting on a keg of dynamite.” This was a Friday, and he needed the money, he said, by Monday morning at the latest. His relatives hastily began making arrangements to buy Mike Irvine’s company stock, putting up their own stock as collateral for loans. At 5:00 P.M. on Saturday, Mike Irvine met with Paul Trousdale, the owner of the Trousdale Construction Company, a Los Angeles firm that was negotiating to buy some Irvine coastal land for subdivisions. “He offered to sell his stock to me for five million dollars,” Trousdale said later. “It was very peculiar. I felt like I was a last resort. He wanted to sell that day, and he wanted cash. He was very nervous. I told him I would buy the stock Monday morning.” The family was also ready to buy his stock on Monday, and on Sunday afternoon a niece telephoned him at the mansion to tell him so. But it was too late. Mike Irvine’s body was found in the basement of the mansion with two shotgun blasts in his abdomen and the bullet from a .22 caliber pistol in his head.
Family members and friends reacted with shocked disbelief to the coroner’s verdict that Mike Irvine’s death had been suicide. He had left no note, and for a man to have used two different guns to shoot himself in both the stomach and the head seemed almost a physical impossibility. The family was convinced that he had been murdered and that it was a Mafia slaying somehow connected with Las Vegas. But a lengthy investigation by the California attorney general’s office could turn up nothing. At one point in the grim proceedings Mike Irvine’s body was exhumed and another autopsy was performed. But again the coroner’s verdict came back: suicide.
If there was any comfort for the family, it was in the realization that at least old J.I. was no longer there to face the terrible circumstances of the death of the last of his three children. But Mike Irvine’s bizarre death raised even more questions about his relationship with Brad Hellis and Walter Tubach, the third member of the fatal fishing party in Montana, who had become the principal real estate broker for the Irvine Company.
Mike Irvine died in 1959. Now, to gather up the other threads of the strange story, it is necessary to go back to the year of his brother Jase’s death in 1935.
A few years before his death Jase Irvine had married for a second time (an earlier, childless marriage had ended in divorce). His bride was Athalie Richardson, and their only child had been named Athalie Anita Irvine, after her mother and her Grandmother Irvine. When her father died little Athalie Anita was only two years old. She was a beautiful child, with blond curls and blue eyes, and she was also, from an early age, extraordinarily willful and precocious. After her father’s death Athalie Anita and her mother went to live with her grandfather, old J.I., at the Irvine mansion. Old J.I. doted on the little girl and gave her everything she wanted, including a whole menagerie of pets, and she quickly grew to adore him. Unlike certain of her cousins, she was not frightened by her grandfather’s bald head and hairless face. From the time of her father’s death until J.I.’s death her grandfather loomed as the towering influence in her life. Even when she was a tiny child, friends used to comment on how strongly, in terms of temperament, she resembled him.
From an early age the little girl demonstrated an exceptional ability to get her own way and, if not to make friends, to influence people. At the age of five she decided that “Athalie” was hard to say and anounced that she had renamed herself Joan. She had gotten the name, she said, from a Mother Goose nursery rhyme:
Here am I, little jumping Joan;
When nobody’s with me,
I’m always alone.
The name stuck, and some people suspected that more than Mother Goose was involved in her choice, since as Joan Irvine she now had the same monogram as old J.I. At seven her grandfather gave her a pony so that she could ride around the ranch with him. He took her on fishing trips in the mountains and shopping trips to Europe. At the ranch she often visited him in his office, and he let her sit in on his business meetings. As a young girl she was quick to notice and point out to him that some of his staff and associates tried to take advantage of him, and together the two enjoyed plotting ways to outwit the schemers.
She spent her summers at the family cottage on the family beach at Irvine Cove, where she body-surfed, snorkeled, learned to play tennis, show horses, race sailboats, and, later, fly airplanes and paint. From the cove she would ride her horse or drive her jeep up into the golden brown hills and the green fertile valleys which, on much of the ranch, were really not used for anything—just beautiful, empty land stretching to the horizon and, beyond the horizon, more land.
Growing up in the 1930s and 1940s, she could not help being aware of the incredible, sprawling growth that was taking place in Los Angeles, where the population jumped from a little over a half million in 1920 to more than a million and a half in 1940. The war, with the burgeoning military installations and the importance of the aircraft industry, would add another half million people. Los Angeles was growing out of all control—northward into the San Fernando Valley, gobbling up Burbank, Glendale, and Van Nuys, threatening to push onward into Oxnard and Ventura. In Beverly Hills, where not much had been before—the Doheny family had owned one whole mountain—movie stars and motion picture moguls were building Italianate mansions. Eastward, Los Angeles was stretching out toward Pasadena, and southward the population push had passed Long Beach. But south of that the great press of p
eople was stopped at the frontier of the Irvine ranch, which lay athwart the expansion path of one of the fastest growing metropolitan areas in the world. Here, where the builders along the increasingly valuable coastline met the undeveloped coast that belonged to the ranch, everything stopped. The great, empty wilderness of the ranch lay like a peacefully sleeping giant with its back against the city.
Growing up in this expansive era—and in the process becoming a tall, slender, athletic, and strikingly beautiful young woman—Joan Irvine on her horse or in her jeep, surveying the ranch, began to dream of whole communities, whole cities, that could be built there. In her mind she planned shopping centers, parks, apartment complexes, hotels, industrial parks, futuristic office towers, luxurious houses overlooking the sea, a university, marinas, yacht harbors. The land was there to contain all these things, a Utopian city of tomorrow.
More than anything, though, Joan Irvine had begun to dream that all this land—as far as the eye could see and beyond—might one day be hers.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Tough Lady
One reason why it was hard to take Joan Irvine as seriously as she obviously wished to be taken was that she was, after all, “only a woman.” In the traditionally all-male world of big-time ranching a woman’s function was supposed to be decorative and domestic. In fact, this was a rule that applied pretty much to the state of California, where the mentality of the mining camp died hard. (In the mining camp the miner was hardworking, hard-drinking, the boss; his women were simply whores.) In California, even in the 1950s, there were only a limited number of things considered acceptable for a moneyed woman to do. She could shop at I. Magnin. She could join her moneyed women friends for Monday lunch (the fashionable day) at the old Mural Room of the St. Francis Hotel. She could plan menus with her Chinese cook and pen invitations to little dinner parties and thank-you notes to her hostesses. Some volunteer work was expected of her, either for the Junior League or for something high-minded like art or something unquestionably worthy, such as the children’s hospital. Beyond that was man’s stuff. A woman was not expected to handle money or manage a checkbook, and all of her bills were placed, unopened, on her husband’s desk. She was supposed to stay out of politics and certainly out of business. Otherwise she found herself in deep trouble in the California he-man’s world. Which was exactly where Joan Irvine found herself in 1957—a big, beautiful blonde who couldn’t possibly have a brain in her head, meddling in the affairs of men.
In fact, other than as a sportswoman and passable amateur painter, Joan had not displayed any particular talent. At the Westridge School, a private preparatory school for girls in Pasadena, she had been only an average student, who had a fondness for low-cut dresses and, according to her yearbook, “liquid luaus.” Her exposure to higher education was brief—two dilatory stints at Marymount College, in Los Angeles, and the University of California at Berkeley. And yet, when Westridge was raising funds among alumnae for a new library, Joan responded by writing out a check for twenty-five thousand dollars. Since hers was the largest single contribution, the school christened its new building the Joan Irvine Library.
She had also made several quick passes at being married. At age nineteen she had married a man named Charles Swinden, who was a lifeguard at Laguna Beach. There was a son, James, but the marriage lasted only two years. Next she married Russell S. Penniman III, who was described as “a dashing Navy flier.” Again there was a son, Russell IV, but again the marriage lasted just two years. Her third marriage was to Richard Burt, a contractor, and this lasted another two years but produced no children. Finally she married a Virginia horseman and gentleman farmer named Morton Smith, by whom she had a third son, Morton. Perhaps because Smith was nineteen years older than she and the first of her four husbands to be wealthy in his own right, this marriage seemed to take, and to provide her emotional life with some stability, at least for a while. But her marital record did little to mitigate the impression that Joan Irvine was nothing but a typical spoiled, bored, rich girl who had no idea of what she wanted.
On the other hand, though there was much of her grandfather in Joan, there was also much of her mother. Athalie Irvine was a similarly independent sort who didn’t mind bending the sexist regulations of California society. Mrs. Irvine was eventually remarried, to Judge Thurmond Clarke, a relative of South Carolina’s Senator Strom Thurmond. The new Mrs. Clarke had flung herself enthusiastically into Republican politics in Orange County, a very Republican place. She had also taken a job, as publisher of a Spanish-language movie magazine that her husband owned.
When old J.I. died his company owned the ranch in Orange County, which consisted of about 82,000 acres (reduced from its original size by several forced sales, including two branches of the interstate highway system which traversed it), plus 90,000 acres in Montana, and a smallish—7000 acres—parcel in the Imperial Valley. Fifty-four percent of the stock in this demesne had already been deeded to the Irvine Foundation. In her grandfather’s will Joan was left 22 percent of the stock. Smaller bequests went to his widow, his then one remaining son, and other grandchildren. Thus it was that though the foundation controlled the majority of the voting stock, Joan became the largest individual stockholder in the Irvine Company.
Which brings us to the summer of 1957, when twenty-four-year-old Joan, whose mother had acted as custodian of her stock up to that point, was given her stock and attended her first meeting of the company’s all-male board of directors. She looked very pretty, her blond California hair in a casual California flip style. The gentlemen greeted her warmly, and of course a bit patronizingly, particularly her grandfather’s old friend Loyall McLaren, whom, as a child, she had called “Uncle Loyall.”
The meeting had been expected to be no more than a routine affair. But to everyone’s surprise—and no small amount of displeasure—Joan started off the proceedings by asking a number of tough questions. These involved certain land dealings in the company’s Imperial Valley properties. Brad Hellis, it seemed, had cut himself into partnership with some of these company investments and had also, Joan claimed, taken advantage of his corporate position to buy lands on his own account or in partnership with the company’s real-estate man, Walter Tubach. She demanded that the board terminate these partnership arrangements. The stunned board of directors voted to postpone action on her motion until its next meeting, four months later.
For this meeting Joan arrived—fresh from having her second baby and fresh from a separation from her second husband—armed with lengthy documentation of nine complicated real-estate transactions between Hellis and the company, Tubach and the company, and Hellis and Tubach. In one of these, she alleged, Hellis would in effect be given the two-hundred-thousand-dollar loan that her grandfather had denied him before his death. She moved that the company remove Hellis and have no further dealings with Tubach. The first of many angry exchanges occurred between her and McLaren, who called her a “damned troublemaker.” She responded by calling him “senile.”
It was clear that Joan Irvine was out to depose the palace guard, headed by Hellis, which had run the company since her grandfather’s death ten years earlier. It was also clear that she was out to settle old scores; she had never been convinced that her grandfather’s death had been either natural or accidental. And it was finally clear that the debutante had turned into a Dragon Lady. When no one would second her motion Joan departed from the meeting in fury. As Loyall McLaren bewailed, “The camel has gotten into the tent!”
It was worse than that. At a special meeting of the board that was called a few weeks later Joan announced that she and her mother had engaged counsel and had taken legal action to prepare a stockholders’ suit against the Irvine Company, Hellis and Tubach. She said that the Los Angeles Superior Court would soon subpoena the two men for pretrial testimony, along with several other directors, including Myford Irvine. A few days later Brad Hellis resigned from the company. In return Joan agreed to drop her lawsuit, saying also she didn�
��t want the proceedings to uncover anything that might be damaging to her Uncle Myford, which suggested that a three-way conspiracy might be involved. Naturally she considered Hellis’ resignation a personal victory and a tacit admission on his part of wrongdoing. Hellis, insisting that he had been guilty of no improprieties, also cited Myford as his reason for resigning, saying that he “decided he didn’t want to fight. So I resigned.”
This resignation, of course, seemed to lead to Myford’s sudden decline and, two years later, to his extraordinary death.
Myford Irvine’s “suicide” made a bad corporate situation much worse, for now the company’s reputation was tinged with scandal. On the day of his funeral a hasty meeting of the board was called at the mansion. The immediate problem was succession now that the last adult male Irvine was gone. (In fact, the only remaining male Irvine was Myford’s six-year-old son, James.) Joan vigorously proposed that a three-man executive committee be set up, with herself a member, but this notion was voted down by the board. Instead, while Joan accused them of old-fogyism, the board proceeded to elect its oldest member, seventy-seven-year-old Arthur McFadden, as president of the company, and another old-timer, Loyall McLaren, as vice president. McLaren was also elected president of the foundation.
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