California Rich

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  When the Irvine Company was reorganized in 1977—along lines that it was hoped would satisfy Joan—Linda Gaede and her husband bought back into the new company: “It was too hard to let go. There were all the emotional attachments to the land and to the family.” Though Linda Gaede spent her early childhood on the San Francisco Peninsula, when her grandfather died the family moved to southern California. At first Linda’s mother resisted the idea of living in the little ranch town of Tustin, and the family settled in Pasadena, from which Myford Irvine commuted to the ranch. But soon he too was drawn back to the ranch, where Linda grew up and went to school and, with her bicycle and her horses, rode back and forth between her cousins’ houses. “I’m not a city person,” she says. “I never will be. This is home.”

  This attachment to the land, which often seems so irrational, might provide a further, final insight into the haunting circumstances of Myford Irvine’s death. To begin with, Mike Irvine was a tough man—healthy, hard as nails and, like his father, a bit autocratic. In fact the family often commented on how Mike’s brother, Jase, had inherited their mother’s gentle, soft-spoken, humorous nature. Mike’s tender side displayed itself only in some of the songs he wrote, such as a romantic ballad called “Do You Remember?” Otherwise, like his father, he was all business, an outdoorsman and sportsman. He and his wife liked to take hiking, camping, and riding trips into the mountains; on one trip they spent several weeks living with a remote tribe of Indians. Mike was also a conservative, conventional man. He joined the Kiwanis Club and attended meetings faithfully. In Orange County he was liked for his lack of pretension. He never comported himself like a rich man, and he was often teased because his favorite golfing sweater had a large hole in one sleeve. He was frugal, hated to lose a golf ball, and in the golf games he played with friends, the stakes were never higher than fifty cents or a dollar. (Which makes the argument that he was involved in high-stakes gambling in Nevada seem a bit implausible.) At the same time, he could be philanthropic. In 1953 he spent more than $250,000 to host the International Boy Scout Jamboree on the Irvine ranch.

  Blessed with hindsight, a number of people after his death said that Mike Irvine had just not been “cut out for” ranching, but this is unfair. In the eleven years he headed the Irvine Company a number of important steps were taken by him in his role of guiding the ranch’s shift from agricultural to urban development. Along the coast he headed the development of such key areas as the expensive housing tracts of Irvine Terrace and Cameo Shores. Under his administration the Irvine Coast Country Club was built and the search for the site of the University of California at Irvine was begun. Under Mike Irvine’s leadership the first water from the Colorado River was delivered to the ranch, giving the area the capacity to sustain a larger population increase. While he was in charge, the stage was being set for the master-plan development scheduled for the 1960s and 1970s. Years later Thelma Irvine would recall driving with her husband in 120-degree heat through the well-named Fireball Ranch he had acquired in the Imperial Valley, with a cowboy sitting on the hood of the jeep taking random shots at what seemed like a living sea of dog-size wild jackrabbits. Mike Irvine turned the Fireball into cotton. He developed still another ranch in the Napa Valley. To friends he often expressed his greatest wish, which was, he said, to run the ranch operations just as J.I. would have done. To those who knew him, and to whom suicide is considered an act of cowardice, Mike Irvine was no coward.

  In 1950, Mike Irvine asked his wife for a divorce. This came as a great shock to Thelma Irvine, who had then been married to him, more or less happily—or so she thought—for twenty-eight years. It was an even greater shock when she discovered who the woman was whom Mike wanted to marry. She was a pretty blond divorcée named Gloria Wood White, somewhat younger than Mike. Thelma Irvine had considered Gloria White one of her closest friends; long after Gloria’s divorce from William White, Thelma had continued to send Christmas checks to Gloria’s children. Furthermore, Gloria White was practically a member of the family. Her first husband had been Big Kate’s son by her first marriage; in other words, Mike Irvine wanted to marry his stepmother’s former daughter-in-law. Mike and Thelma were divorced, and later that year Mike and Gloria White were married.

  Today, at eighty, living alone in a large apartment overlooking the Pacific, Thelma Irvine is bright, chipper and healthily tanned from a daily four-mile walk. She no longer harbors any real resentment toward the woman, now dead, who replaced her in her husband’s affections years ago. But she is convinced that her husband’s second marriage was not a happy one. She and Myford Irvine, for example, had never bothered to be listed in the San Francisco Social Register. Gloria, on the other hand, wanted a listing and saw to it that her husband got one for her. She was demanding in other ways, particularly in terms of money. Others who remember the couple agree that there were frequent money arguments. In 1953, Gloria Irvine gave birth to a son whom the couple named James Myford Irvine.

  On Sunday morning, January 11, 1959, Mike Irvine awoke at 7:30, as usual, had breakfast, and spent the morning pottering about the house in his usual fashion. According to Gloria’s later account, at one o’clock she, Mike, and five-year-old Jimmy, whom his father adored, sat down for lunch in the dining room, and Mike Irvine had a can of beer. He then announced his intention of going down to the ranch office to do some work. This in itself was odd; it was Sunday, and the office was closed. Gloria said that it was time for Jimmy’s nap, and Mike Irvine said, “Goodbye, son, I’ll see you when you get up.” Gloria Irvine said that she also wanted to take a nap. Nothing, according to Gloria, seemed wrong.

  At three o’clock, in Gloria’s account of the day, she awoke from her nap, roused her son, and drove with him down to the ranch office to visit her husband. This, she said, was a customary practice. That, at least, was what Gloria Irvine told Deputy Coroner James Pond, but this is even odder than the fact that Mike Irvine should have gone to his office on a Sunday afternoon. The ranch house and Myford’s Irvine’s office were next door to each other, barely a hundred feet apart. No one ever drove between the two places, and Thelma Irvine remembers that she often used to carry bowls of flowers over to the office from the house. Why would Gloria and her son have driven to the office? To collect him and drive him home? He always walked the meager distance. In any case, as Gloria’s account to the deputy coroner continued, she arrived at the office, found no one there, and then drove home.

  As she walked with her son from the garage to the house she noticed that the sky had darkened with a half-winter threat of rain, and Jimmy pointed out a light that was burning in the window of a basement storeroom. The two went down into the storeroom to investigate, and there they found Mike Irvine, slumped in a kneeling position, his right side resting against several cases of liquor and his head a few inches from the floor. Gloria Irvine screamed, seized her son’s hand, and ran upstairs to telephone her doctor, Thomas B. Rhone, whom she told, “My husband has shot himself!” In less than twenty minutes Dr. Rhone was at the ranch house and telephoned the Orange County coroner.

  On the left side of Mike Irvine’s body, with his hand resting on the barrel, lay a 16-gauge Belgian Browning automatic shotgun, and on the other side of the body, beside a cardboard box, was a Smith & Wesson six-inch .22 caliber blue steel six-shot revolver. The shotgun had one expended shell casing in the chamber, and another expended casing was found on the floor about three feet away. On top of a case of liquor was a partially filled box of .22 caliber long-rifle cartridges; one cartridge was lying on the box, one on the floor, and one expended casing was in the chamber. One live round remained in the chamber, and the other chambers of the cylinder were empty.

  The two shotgun blasts had entered Mike Irvine’s abdomen. The bullet from the revolver had entered his right temple. There were powder burns there. There were also powder burns found on the index and middle fingers of his left hand. But Mike Irvine was not left-handed. And to have fired a bullet into his right temple with his l
eft hand would seem to have required the skill of a contortionist.

  In concluding that all three gunshot wounds were self-inflicted, the coroner reasoned that Mike Irvine, holding the shotgun near the muzzle, had triggered the first shot into his abdomen with his right hand. Then, since the gun was an automatic, a second shot into the abdomen, directly into the first, had been caused by the gun’s recoil against a concrete wall and the corresponding weight of Mike Irvine’s body. Then, still conscious, Mike had reached for the revolver with his left hand and had finished the job with a bullet in his temple. Medical tests were made for both alcohol and barbiturates. No trace of either was found. The house was thoroughly searched for a suicide note and, as we know, none was found.

  The coroner placed the time of death at two o’clock in the afternoon while Gloria Irvine and her son were supposedly peacefully asleep upstairs. The Irvine mansion was old, uninsulated, full of creaks. It was a big white-shingled place, much added-to over the years until it eventually contained some thirty rooms; like Topsy, the house “just growed.” It had been renovated at least six times to suit the tastes of a series of Irvine women, but it was still an old house. Much of its plumbing was also old, and periodically a toilet in an upstairs bathroom would flush all by itself; its erupting geyser could be heard all over the house, and the family would laugh and joke about ghosts. (In 1968, not quite ten years after Mike Irvine’s death, some faulty wiring sparked and the mansion was all but destroyed by fire; the marquetry floors, hand-carved balustrades of the staircases, and other rich details were deemed irreplaceable, and the charred remains of the house were razed.) By 1959, J.I.’s pack of yelping hounds no longer shared the house with its human occupants, and the house was a quiet place. Yet no sleeper on the second floor had been disturbed by the angry sounds of gunfire. On the first floor the Irvines’ cook, Opal Johnson, was in the kitchen, but heard nothing. Neither did a maid, Lois Doak, who was gossiping with Opal Johnson at the time. The two servants testified that they were aware of no signs of marital discord between Mr. and Mrs. Irvine.

  Gloria Irvine could offer no real explanation for her husband’s suicide, nor could she say why, when telephoning Dr. Rhone, she had immediately leaped to the conclusion that he had killed himself. She did say, however, that since Christmas her husband had seemed depressed, though she apparently had not considered his condition severe enough to inquire into its cause. True, there had been his near-frantic efforts to raise a large sum of money in the few days preceding his death and his remark to the family that he was “sitting on a keg of dynamite.” But the family, while apparently perfectly willing to help him raise the money, had for some reason not bothered to inquire as to what the keg of dynamite was. At one point Joan Irvine’s stepfather, Judge Clarke, had asked Mike Irvine why he didn’t borrow the money he needed from a bank. Rather airily Mike had replied, “I’ve never had to borrow from a bank before, and I’m not going to start now.”

  The mystery deepened when the details of Mike Irvine’s estate were revealed. He died worth well over $10,000,000 and had an income of over $500,000 a year. Why should he have had such a pressing need for cash?

  In a book on organized crime called The Grim Reapers the author, Ed Reid, speculates that Mike Irvine had somehow got involved with the underworld and gambling and in the building of Caesars Palace Hotel in Las Vegas. But Mr. Reid produces no hard evidence to support this and, admitting that he is merely guessing, concludes, “The answer may lie in the sands of Las Vegas, under dunes flattened by the weight of Caesars Palace and the pressure of unhappy and unholy memories.” It does seem that Mike Irvine would have been too thoughtful a man, too considerate of his family, to have destroyed himself in a basement storeroom, in such an untidy way, while his wife and young son were asleep upstairs. There is also the illogical fact of the two guns. Mike Irvine was an expert hunter, familiar with firearms and their various capabilities, well aware that the simplest, neatest way to dispatch a life is a bullet between the eyes. Would he have ended his own life so clumsily? Had he, in preparing for his suicide, actually brought two guns into the basement with the thought that if the shotgun into the belly didn’t work he would have the pistol handy as insurance? Finally, there is the impossible-to-answer question of why the pistol was held in the left hand and fired into the right temple.

  Thelma Irvine did not attend her former husband’s funeral, reasoning that there was already “too much notoriety” surrounding his death. But considering that she had been married to him for twenty-eight years, that he had courted her for three years before that, and that she had known him throughout college, she feels, with some justification, that she knew the man better than did any other person. She gives no credence to either the suicide theory or the talk of Las Vegas connections. “He never went to Las Vegas,” she says. “He hated to gamble. He was a terrible poker player. When he played golf with me he refused to play for money, because, with my handicap, it would mean that I would probably win. He was not the suicidal type. He never suffered from depressions. I remember once at a dinner party, not long afterward, Linda asked a doctor friend, Dr. Monaco, if he thought her father could have been a suicide. Dr. Monaco simply shook his head and said, ‘Impossible!’”

  Thelma Irvine also finds it impossible to credit Gloria Irvine’s account of what happened that fatal afternoon. “He never went to the office on a Sunday. The office was closed. The shooting had to have taken place somewhere else. I knew that house like the back of my hand. I knew that storeroom where he was found. I’d remodeled it myself. It used to be a photographic darkroom. But my husband never went into the basement for any reason. The room was directly underneath the kitchen and the servants’ quarters. Why didn’t any of the servants hear three shots? I knew the bedroom where Gloria supposedly was sleeping. It had been my bedroom. She would have heard the shots.” Later there were stories in southern California that Myford Irvine had been drinking heavily in the months before his death, and Thelma Irvine finds this also difficult to believe. “He wasn’t a strict teetotaler, like his father,” she says, “but he didn’t really like to drink. Now and then he’d have a drink just to be sociable, but that was it. Can a man’s personality change so completely in such a short time? I just don’t see how.

  “I know he was under tremendous pressure after his brother died. It was an awful strain. After all, he wasn’t trained for the ranch. He was trained for the city. But he bore up wonderfully under the strain and never complained about anything.” In Thelma Irvine’s opinion, Mike Irvine’s death was somehow connected with the family, the company, and the land. At the time of his death he was in the process of building a new ocean-side house at Corona del Mar. He was not building it for himself, however. He was building it for Gloria. It was something Gloria wanted. She hated the old ranch house and wanted a house that was big and modern, with lots of glass. The house was going to cost $325,000 in 1959 dollars.

  In the weeks before his death he had complained to friends that he had misgivings about building this house for Gloria. He had gone to see his personal physician, Dr. Horace Leecing, who had also treated J.I. before him, and had complained of nervousness and insomnia. Today Dr. Leecing, a retired country doctor in his late seventies—who remembers when he charged two dollars for an office visit and three dollars for a house call at the Irvine ranch—recalls Myford Irvine telling him that he thought the new house was “too pretentious” and that he had had second thoughts about giving in to Gloria and moving into such a big, expensive place. He said that he frequently lay awake at night worrying about this project, regretting that he had committed himself to it, and said that he would prefer not to move but to remain on the land of his forebears, on the traditional Irvine ranch. “He told me that living in that house would be like living in a fishbowl,” Dr. Leecing says. “He said he would feel like a fish out of water living there.” Dr. Leecing also received the distinct impression that Mike Irvine’s marriage to Gloria had become a very unhappy one. Dr. Leecing prescr
ibed a variety of sleeping pills and tranquilizers, which Mike Irvine had been taking, and entered a diagnosis of “acute depression.”

  On the afternoon of his death Mike Irvine was seen at the construction site of the new house, walking around on an open sea-facing deck as though inspecting it or, perhaps, saying goodbye to it. So possibly he had not gone to his office at all.

  Thelma Irvine does not go so far as to suggest that Gloria Irvine hired someone to kill her husband so that she wouldn’t be prevented from having her house; Gloria, with a large inheritance from her husband, did indeed eventually move into it. “But,” Thelma says, “there was a man on the ranch who did commit suicide not long after what happened to Mike. And I’ve always wondered whether there might have been a connection.” The man, a company electrician, had been among the first at the scene of the tragedy, and Thelma wonders whether he knew something that might have “weighed on his mind.” Thelma also questions whether Mike Irvine’s death might have been connected with Brad Hellis, the man who had been with J.I. on his final fishing trip and who had resigned from the Irvine Company rather than face Joan’s threatened lawsuit for financial wrongdoing. “Brad Hellis and Walter Tubach were in charge of buying land for J.I.,” says Mrs. Irvine, “but they were cheating J.I. They were buying the best land for themselves and only letting J.I. have what they didn’t want. At one point my husband offered to make Brad a vice-president of the company, but Brad turned it down. Why? Because he knew he couldn’t get away with that sort of thing with Myford.” Had Myford found out too much about Brad Hellis’ speculations, and had Hellis arranged for Mike’s murder to silence him? Neither Hellis nor Gloria Irvine is alive to answer these dark allegations.