Collected Essays

by Joan Didion

  A great deal of Los Angeles as it appears today derived from this impulse to improve Chandler prop­erty. The Los Angeles Civic Center and Union Sta­tion and the curiosity known as Olvera Street (Olvera Street is part of El Pueblo de Los Angeles State His­toric Park, but it was actually conceived in 1926 as the first local theme mall, the theme being “Mexican mar­ketplace”) are where they are because Harry Chandler wanted to develop the north end of downtown, where the Times building and many of his other downtown holdings lay. California has an aerospace industry today because Harry Chandler believed that the de­velopment of Los Angeles required that new industry be encouraged, and, in 1920, called on his friends to lend Donald Douglas $15,000 to build an experimen­tal torpedo plane.

  The same year, Harry Chandler called on his friends to build Caltech, and the year after that to build a facility (the Coliseum, near the University of Southern California) large enough to attract the 1932 Olympics. The Hollywood Bowl exists because Harry Chandler wanted it. The Los Angeles highway system exists because Harry Chandler knew that peo­ple would not buy land in his outlying subdivisions unless they could drive to them, and also because Harry Chandler sat on the board of Goodyear Tire & Rubber, which by then had Los Angeles plants. Goodyear Tire & Rubber had Los Angeles plants in the first place because Harry Chandler and his friends made an investment of $7.5 million to build them.

  It was this total identification of the Chandler fam­ily’s destiny with that of Los Angeles that made the Times so peculiar an institution, and also such a rich one. Under their corporate umbrella, the Times Mir­ror Company, the Chandlers now own, for all practi­cal purposes, not only the Times, which for a number of years carried more full-run advertising linage than any other newspaper in the United States, but Newsday, New York Newsday, the Baltimore Sun, the Hartford Courant, the National Journal, nine specialized book and educational-publishing houses, seventeen special­ized magazines, the CBS affiliates in Dallas and Austin, the ABC affiliate in St. Louis, the NBC affil­iate in Birmingham, a cable-television business, and a company that exists exclusively to dispose of what had been Times Mirror’s timber and ranchland (this com­pany, since it is meant to self-destruct, is described by Times Mirror as “entropic”): an empire with operating revenues for 1989 of $3,517,493,000.

  The climate in which the Times prospered was a special one. Los Angeles had been, through its entire brief history, a boom town. People who lived there had tended to believe, and were encouraged to do so by the increasingly fat newspaper dropped at their doors every morning, that the trend would be unfail­ingly up. It seemed logical that the people who made business work in California should begin to desert San Francisco, which had been since the gold rush the financial center of the West, and look instead to Los Angeles, where the money increasingly was. It seemed logical that shipping should decline in San Francisco, one of the world’s great natural ports, even as it flourished in Los Angeles, where a port had to be dredged, and was, at the insistence of the Times and Harry Chandler. It seemed logical that the wish to dredge this port should involve, since Los Angeles was originally landlocked, the annexation first of a twenty-mile corridor to the sea and then the “consoli­dation” with Los Angeles (“annexation” of one incorporated city by another was prohibited by state law) of two entire other cities, San Pedro and Wilmington, both of which lay on the Pacific.

  The logic here was based on the declared imperative of unlimited opportunity, which in turn dictated un­limited growth. What was construed by people in the rest of the country as accidental—the sprawl of the city, the apparent absence of a cohesive center—was in fact purposeful, the scheme itself: this would be a new kind of city, one that would seem to have no finite limits, a literal cloud on the land that would even­tually touch the Tehachapi range to the north and the Mexican border to the south, the San Bernardino Mountains to the east and the Pacific to the west; not just a city finally but its own nation, The Southland. That the Chandlers had been sufficiently prescient to buy up hundreds of thousands of acres on the far reaches of the expanding cloud—300,000 acres span­ning the Tehachapi, 860,000 acres in Baja California, which Harrison Gray Otis and Harry Chandler were at one point trying to get the Taft administration to annex from Mexico, thereby redefining even what might have seemed Southern California’s one fixed border (the Pacific was seen locally as not a border but an opportunity, a bridge to Hawaii and on to Asia)— was only what might be expected of any provident citizen: “The best interests of Los Angeles are para­mount to the Times,” Harry Chandler wrote in 1934, and it had been, historically, the Times that defined what those best interests were.

  The Times under Harrison Gray Otis was a paper in which the owners’ opponents were routinely de­scribed as “thieves”, “scoundrels”, “blackmailers”, “venal”, “cowardly”, “mean”, “un-American”, “assassinlike”, “petty”, “despotic”, and “anarchic scum”. It was said of General Otis (he had been commissioned a brigadier general when he led an expeditionary force to the Philippines during the Spanish-American War, and he was General Otis forever after, just as his houses were The Bivouac and The Outpost, the Times building was The Fortress, and the Times staff The Phalanx) that he had a remarkably even temper, that of a hungry tiger. A libel suit or judgment against the paper was seen as neither a problem nor an embarrass­ment but a journalistic windfall, an opportunity to reprint the offending story, intact and often. In No­vember of 1884, after the election of Grover Cleveland to the presidency, the Times continued to maintain for eleven days that the president-elect was James G. Blaine, Harrison Gray Otis’s candidate.

  Even under Harry Chandler’s son Norman, who was publisher from 1944 until 1960, the Times contin­ued to exhibit a fitful willfulness. The Los Angeles for which the Times was at that time published was still remote from the sources of national and international power, isolated not only geographically but developmentally, a deliberately adolescent city, intent on its own growth and not much interested in the world outside. In 1960, when Norman Chandler’s son Otis was named publisher of the Times, the paper had only one foreign correspondent, based in Paris. The city itself was run by a handful of men who worked for the banks and the old-line law firms downtown and drove home at five o’clock to Hancock Park or Pasadena or San Marino. They had lunch at the California Club or the Los Angeles Athletic Club. They held their weddings and funerals in Protestant or Catholic churches and did not, on the whole, know people who lived on the West Side, in Beverly Hills and Bel Air and Brentwood and Pacific Palisades, many of the most prominent of whom were in the entertainment business and were Jewish. As William Severns, the original general manager of the Los Angeles Music Center’s operating company, put it in a recent inter­view with Patt Morrison of the Times, there was at that time a “big schism in society” between these downtown people and what he called “the movie group”. The movie group, he said, “didn’t even know where downtown was, except when they came down­town for a divorce”. (This was in itself a cultural crossed connection, since people on the West Side generally got divorced not downtown but in Santa Monica.)

  It was Norman Chandler’s wife, Dorothy Buffum Chandler, called Buff, who perceived that it was in the interests of the city, and therefore of the Times, to draw the West Side into the power structure, and she saw the Music Center, for which she was then raising money, as a natural way to initiate this process. I once watched Mrs. Chandler, at a dinner sometime in 1964, try to talk the late Jules Stein, the founder and at that time the chairman of MCA, into contributing $25,000 toward the construction of the Music Center. Jules Stein said that he would be glad to donate any amount to Mrs. Chandler’s Music Center, and would then expect Mrs. Chandler to make a matching contri­bution, for this was the way things got done on the West Side, to the eye clinic he was then building at the UCLA Medical Center. “I can’t do that,” Mrs. Chandler said, and then she leaned across the table, and demonstrated what the Chandlers had always seen as t
he true usefulness of owning a newspaper: “But I can give you twenty-five thousand dollars’ worth of free publicity in the paper.”

  By the time Mrs. Chandler was through, the Music Center and one of its support groups, The Amazing Blue Ribbon, had become the common ground on which the West Side met downtown. This was not to say that all the top editors and managers at the Times were entirely comfortable on the West Side; many of them tended still to regard it as alien, a place where people exchanged too many social kisses and held novel, if not dangerous, ideas. “I always enjoy visiting the West Side,” I recall being told by Tom Johnson, who had in 1980 become the publisher of the Times, when we happened to be seated next to each other at a party in Brentwood. He then took a notepad and a pen from his pocket. “I like to hear what people out here think.” Nor was it to say that an occasional citi­zen of a more self-absorbed Los Angeles did not still surface, and even write querulous letters to the Times:

  Regarding “The Party Pace Picks Up Dur­ing September” (by Jeannine Stein, Aug.31): the social season in Los Angeles starts the first Friday in October when the Au­tumn Cotillion is held. This event, started over fifty years ago, brings together the so­cially prominent folks of Los Angeles who wouldn’t be seen in Michael’s and haven’t yet decided if the opera is here to stay. By the time Cotillion comes around families are back from vacation, dove hunting season is just over and deer hunting season hasn’t begun so the gentlemen of the city find no excuse not to attend. Following that comes the annual Assembly Ball and the Chevaliers du Tastevin dinner followed by the Las Madrinas Debutante Ball. If you are invited to these events you are in socially. No nouveau riche or publicity seekers nor social climbers need apply.

  The Times in which this letter appeared, on Septem­ber 10, 1989, was one that maintained six bureaus in Europe, five in Latin America, five in Asia, three in the Middle East, and two in Africa. It was reaching an area inhabited by between 13 and 14 million peo­ple, more than half of whom, a recent Rand Corpora­tion study suggests, had arrived in Los Angeles as adults, eighteen years old or over, citizens whose memories did not include the Las Madrinas Debu­tante Ball. In fact there is in Los Angeles no memory everyone shares, no monument everyone knows, no historical reference as meaningful as the long sweep of the ramps where the San Diego and Santa Monica freeways intersect, as the way the hard Santa Ana light strikes the palm trees against the white western wall of the Carnation Milk building on Wilshire Bou­levard. Mention of “historic” sites tends usually to signal a hustle under way, for example transforming a commercial development into historic Olvera Street, or wrapping a twenty-story office tower and a four-hundred-room hotel around the historic Mann’s Chinese Theater (the historic Mann’s Chinese Theater was originally Grauman’s Chinese, but a significant percentage of the population has no reason to remem­ber this), a featured part of the Hollywood Redevel­opment.

  Californians until recently spoke of the United States beyond Colorado as “back east”. If they went to New York, they went “back” to New York, a way of speaking that carried with it the suggestion of living on a distant frontier. Californians of my daughter’s generation speak of going “out” to New York, a mean­ingful shift in the perception of one’s place in the world. The Los Angeles that Norman and Buff Chan­dler’s son Otis inherited in 1960—and, with his mother, proceeded over the next twenty years to rein­vent—was, in other words, a new proposition, poten­tially one of the world’s great cities but still unformed, outgrowing its old controlling idea, its tropistic confi­dence in growth, and not yet seized by a new one. It was Otis Chandler who decided that what Los Ange­les needed if it was to be a world-class city was a world-class newspaper, and he set out to get one.

  Partly in response to the question of what a daily newspaper could do that television could not do bet­ter, and partly in response to geography—papers on the West Coast have a three-hour advantage going to press, and a three-hour disadvantage when they come off the press—Otis Chandler, then thirty-two, de­cided that the Times should be what was sometimes called a daily magazine, a newspaper that would cover breaking news competitively, but remain willing to commit enormous resources to providing a kind of analysis and background no one else was providing. He made it clear at the outset that the paper was no longer his father’s but his, antagonizing members of his own family in 1961 by running a five-part report on the John Birch Society, of which his aunt and uncle Alberta and Philip Chandler were influential mem­bers. Otis Chandler followed up the John Birch series, in case anyone had missed the point, by signing the Chandler name to a front-page editorial opposing Birch activities. “His legs bestrid the ocean, his reared arm crested the world,” as the brass letters read (for no clear reason, since it is what Cleopatra says about Antony as the asps are about to arrive in the fifth act of Antony and Cleopatra) at the base of the turning globe in the lobby of the Times building. “His voice was propertied to all the tuned spheres.” One reason Otis Chandler could property the voice of the Times to all the tuned spheres was that his Times continued to make more money than his father’s. “The paper was published every day and they could see it,” he later said about his family. “They disagreed endlessly with my editorial policies. But they never disagreed with the financial results.”

  In fact an unusual kind of reporting developed at the Times, the editorial philosophy of which was fre­quently said to be “run it long and run it once”. The Times became a paper on which reporters were al­lowed, even encouraged, to give the reader the kind of detail that was known to everyone on the scene but rarely got filed. On the night Son of Sam was arrested in New York, according to Charles T. Powers, then in the Times’ New York bureau, Roone Arledge was walking around Police Headquarters, “dressed as if for a touch football game, a glass of scotch in one hand, a portable two-way radio in the other, directing his network’s feed to the Coast”, details that told the reader pretty much all there was to know about celeb­rity police work. In San Salvador in the early spring of 1982, when representatives from the centrist Chris­tian Democrats, the militarist National Conciliation Party, and the rightist ARENA were all meeting under a pito tree on Francisco (“Chachi”) Guerrero’s patio, Laurie Becklund of the Times asked Guerrero, who has since been assassinated, how people so op­posed to one another could possibly work together. “We all know each other—we’ve known each other for years,” he said. “You underestimate our politico tropical.” A few days later, when Laurie Becklund asked an ARENA leader why ARENA, then trying to close out the Christian Democrats, did not fear losing American aid, the answer she got, and filed, summed up the entire relationship between the United States and the Salvadoran right: “We believe in gringos.”

  This kind of detail was sometimes dismissed by reporters at other papers as “L.A. color”, but really it was something different: the details gave the tone of the situation, the subtext without which the text could not be understood, and sharing this subtext with the reader was the natural tendency of reporters who, be­cause of the nature of both the paper on which they worked and the city in which it was published, tended not to think of themselves as insiders. “Jesse don’t wanna run nothing but his mouth,” Mayor Marion Barry of Washington, D.C., was quoted as having said, about Jesse Jackson, early in 1990 in a piece by Bella Stumbo in the Los Angeles Times; there was in this piece, I was told in New York, after both the New York Times and the Washington Post had been forced to report the ensuing controversy, nothing that many Post and New York Times reporters in Washington did not already know. This was presumably true, but only the Los Angeles Times had printed it.

  Unconventional choices were made at the Times. Otis Chandler had insisted that the best people in the country be courted and hired, regardless of their pol­itics. The political cartoonist Paul Conrad was lured from the Denver Post, brought out for an interview, and met at the airport, per his demand, by the editor of the paper. Robert Scheer, who had a considerable reputation as a political jo
urnalist at Ramparts and New Times but no newspaper experience, was not only hired but given whatever he wanted, including the use of the executive dining room, the Picasso Room. “For the money we’re paying Scheer, I should hope he’d be abrasive,” William Thomas, the editor of the Times from 1971 until 1989, said to a network executive who called to complain that Scheer had been abrasive in an interview. The Times had by then abandoned tradi­tional ideas of what newspaper reporters and editors should be paid, and was in some cases paying double the going rate. “I don’t think newspapers should take a back seat to magazines, TV, or public relations,” Otis Chandler had said early on. He had bought the Times a high-visibility Washington bureau. He had bought the Times a foreign staff.

  By 1980, when Otis Chandler named Tom Johnson the publisher of the Times and created for himself the new title of editor in chief, the Times was carrying, in the average week, more columns of news than either the New York Times or the Washington Post. It was run­ning long analytical background pieces from parts of the country and of the world that other papers left to the wires. Its Washington bureau, even Bob Wood­ward of the Washington Post conceded recently, was frequently beating the Post. Its foreign coverage, par­ticularly from Central America and the Middle East, was, day for day, stronger than that of the national competition. “Otis was a little more specific than just indicating he wanted the Times to be among the top U.S. newspapers,” Nick Williams, the editor of the Times from 1958 until 1971, said later of Otis Chan­dler’s ascension to publisher of the Times. “He said, I want it to be the number one newspaper in the coun­try.’ “ What began worrying people in Los Angeles during the fall of 1989, starting on the morning in October when the Times unveiled the first edition of what it referred to on billboards and television adver­tisements and radio spots and bus shelters and bus tails and rack cards and in-paper advertisements and even in its own house newsletter as “the new, faster-format Los Angeles Times”, was whether having the number one newspaper in the country was a luxury the Chandlers, and the city, could still afford.