The Battle for Beverly Hills

by Nancie Clare

  Considerable attention was paid by newspapers to descriptions of the actual device in addition to quoting the message that was attached. An almost full-page photo of what was left of the bomb, including the message, dominated the front page of the February 27, 1923, Los Angeles Examiner. In the Examiner, Murphy describes the package that contained the “infernal machine” as being “wrapped in manila paper, and a number of canceled postage stamps to lend the appearance that it had been through the ‘mails,’ were attached.” Murphy went on to add that he thought “it was a present from a friend” and that he attached no suspicion to the box.6 In the Los Angeles Evening Herald the bomb was described as “composed of two dry cell batteries and a complicated system of switches which ignited a quantity of black powder when the cover was lifted.”7 The Los Angeles Record offered a similar description in its February 28, 1923, edition, adding that the wiring system “was capable of exploding a large amount of high explosives.”8

  Sheriff Traeger had a lot on his plate in February 1923, what with the Tiger Woman on the loose in Central America (L.A. County undersheriff Eugene W. Biscailuz deputized his wife before the couple headed down to Honduras to supervise the capture of Clara Phillips. Mrs. Biscailuz would contract malaria while in the jungle, dying from it in 1950) and a jail corruption scandal of deputies taking bribes for releasing inmates. Nevertheless, Traeger assigned two L.A. sheriff’s deputies, John B. Fox and Charles Catlin, to investigate.9

  According to the February 27, 1923, edition of the Los Angeles Evening Express, in addition to the law enforcement investigation, the “direction of the search for the culprits is in the hands of R. J. Culver, president of the Culver Corporation.”10 The Los Angeles Evening Express also reported that prominent residents of Beverly Hills made sure “unlimited money has been made available” to discover the guilty party or parties. In the same article, Mr. Culver is quoted as saying “that there are now working on the case a number of detectives from the Burns agency and the force of Sheriff Traeger.” (The Burns Agency was founded by William John Burns, the American “Sherlock Holmes,” who is famous for conducting a private investigation into the notorious steeped-in-anti-Semitism wrongful conviction of Leo Frank in the 1913 murder of Mary Phagan in Atlanta. Burns’ investigation showed that Frank was innocent of the crime. Not that it did much good. When Frank’s death sentence was commuted to life in prison by the governor of Georgia in 1915, a mob abducted Frank from the penitentiary and lynched him. Burns had also investigated the L.A. Times bombing in 1911 and served as a director of the Bureau of Investigation, the predecessor to the FBI.)11 Not to be outdone, the L.A. Times reported that $500 had been sent to the paper as a reward for information leading to the arrest of the person or persons who sent the bomb. The source of the reward was not reported.

  A follow-up article in the Los Angeles Examiner reported that the day after the bombing “hundreds thronged the office of the News to receive confirmation from Mr. Murphy of the explosion.”12 In the same article, one unnamed Beverly Hills resident said of the bombing, “That’s not the spirit of Beverly Hills.” Murphy, his hands and face still sporting bandages from the burns he had sustained the previous morning, agreed with the sentiment expressed by the resident who was quoted and then went on to deliver what can only be described as one of the most confusing statements of the whole confusing situation: “Although I have been bitterly assailed for the stand taken in my newspaper in favor of annexation, I do not regard the bomb as the work of Beverly Hills people who are honest in their convictions on the opposite side of the issue.”13 Which raises the question: Who else but someone who had something to either gain or lose would take such extreme action? Was Murphy suggesting that for some unknown reason outside agitators were interfering with a legal political process in a small suburb on the western edge of Los Angeles? It’s highly unlikely that any of the usual suspects of the era who tended to resort to bombs, such as Bolsheviks or anarchists, had wandered into the small, affluent community determined to save it from itself by preventing its annexation to a larger city. Who else but residents of Beverly Hills cared whether or not their city voted to annex itself to Los Angeles? The answer, of course, is no one. (As for the list of suspects Al Murphy had given to the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, those names are lost to the mists of time. In 1969 the L.A. County Sheriff’s office purged its records when the filing system was changed. Before that purge, the department saved every piece of paper going back to the 1850s. As Michael A. Fratantoni, the archivist for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, wrote in an email, “What a treasure that must have been.”)14

  L.A. sheriff deputies Fox and Catlin pursued the investigation from two diverging angles suggested by the Beverly Hills citizens they interviewed: that the bomb truly was the work of anti-annexationists, and from the diametrically opposite position that it was a publicity stunt to garner sympathy for the pro-annexation effort in general and Editor Murphy in particular.

  No one, including those on Mr. Murphy’s list of potential suspects, was ever arrested for the bombing. In fact, Deputies Fox and Catlin determined there had never actually been a bombing. On March 1, 1923, two Los Angeles dailies, the Evening Herald and the Record, reported that the explosion had not been a bomb after all. The Los Angeles Evening Herald reported that “what was first believed to be an attempt to assassinate Al Murphy, editor of the Beverly Hills News, was classed today by deputy sheriffs who investigated the case as a practical joke.… The officers found the ‘bomb’ was made out of small firecrackers.”15 The Los Angeles Record reported that the “joke” had been played on Murphy by a resident “in connection with the annexation fight.”16 The whole story was digested and reduced to a two-paragraph summary on the front page of the New York Times, also on March 1, whose headline, “‘Infernal Machine’ Explodes; Firecrackers Injure Editor,” and description of the damage as “the blistering of [Editor Al] Murphy’s hand”17 offered a succinct summary of the whole bizarre incident. As for the Los Angeles Examiner, after its follow-up articles on the pursuit of suspects, expectation of arrests, and the rally in support of Al Murphy and against the “bomb,” there wasn’t another drop of ink devoted to the subject.

  Naturally, there was a great deal of speculation about who had sent the so-called bomb. Considering the distance from scandal and negative publicity the celebrities living in Beverly Hills wanted to maintain, it’s difficult to imagine that any of them would have taken an action that would result in even more scrutiny. In fact, it’s safe to say that most of the celebrities associated with the anti-annexation movement would not have been amused by either the explosion, joke or otherwise, or the insinuation that it had been sent by a resident. Actors and film crews alike developed a healthy respect for flammable and explosive material, because as fun as it looked, in reality, making movies was dangerous work. Aside from film stock, which was made from highly flammable silver nitrate that regularly burst into flames at studios, causing both severe injuries and substantial property loss, actors themselves were frequently at risk. Explosives were often used as special effects, especially in location shooting, and accidents that sometimes caused serious injuries were not uncommon. In November 1923, six months after the annexation election, Tom Mix was almost killed in a stunt-gone-wrong that was staged during the filming of Eyes of the Forest—an explosive charge planted under the path he was riding on went off prematurely. In August 1919, at the cusp of his becoming a star, Harold Lloyd wasn’t even making a movie when a bomb—originally made to cause an explosion in a non-Lloyd film—blew the thumb and forefinger off his right hand and blinded him for a time. Lloyd had been shooting publicity stills, one of which was to show him lighting a cigarette from the lit fuse of what was supposed to be a papier-mâché bomb. Only it wasn’t pretend, it was a real explosive that had for some unknown reason been placed with bomb facsimiles. Lloyd spent six weeks in the hospital, and while his sight returned, in an era before antibiotics doctors feared that if gangrene developed on
his hand, the wound might kill him.

  Truth be told, though, Mr. Murphy’s paper wasn’t held in the highest regards in the community. Because the bomb hadn’t been very powerful, gossip of the day suggested that it had been self-directed to make the pro-annexation cause more sympathetic to the citizens of Beverly Hills. In notes on a history of Beverly Hills he was writing for the Beverly Hills Citizen in 1941 about the annexation attempt, former city clerk B. J. Firminger wrote: “There was a paper here then called Beverly Hills News. The columns were, of course, for sale. The publisher sided with the annexationists which was a splendid thing for the other side—it being that sort of paper.” In the May 9, 1941, Beverly Hills Citizen article, Firminger modified what he’d written to suggest that Al Murphy was driven by economic need, writing, “The publisher was living from hand to mouth, and the columns of the paper were apparently for sale.”18

  * * *

  In fact, every step of the march toward potential annexation to Los Angeles had been recorded on the public record. The petition requesting a special election so the citizens of Beverly Hills could vote on the matter had been circulated early in 1923 and had received enough signatures to be presented. And at the March 1, 1923, meeting of the Board of Trustees of the City of Beverly Hills presided over by Silsby Spalding, a motion to accept the signed petition to the fully attended Board “asking for an election to be held to decide on the annexation of the City of Beverly Hills to Los Angeles was presented.”19 Eleven days later, on March 12, 1923, the Board of Trustees swore in Beverly Hills city clerk John G. Soulay, who testified “that he had checked all the signatures with the original registration certificates and found that the petition was signed by 376 qualified registered voters.”20 Soulay’s testimony also included the fact that there had been “slight irregularities” in twenty-seven signatures. Soulay’s final conclusion was that the 349 correct and authentic signatures represented more than 25 percent of the 703 registered voters in the city. After City Clerk Soulay completed his testimony, the Board of Trustees swore in the Beverly Hills city attorney, who testified that the petition was correct in form. In light of the legitimacy of the petition, the Board of Trustees adopted Resolution #73, calling for a special election to settle the question of whether the cities of Beverly Hills and Los Angeles shall be consolidated. Resolution #73 passed unanimously by the four trustees in attendance for that meeting. The vote, to be held at the Beverly Hills Civic Center, was scheduled for April 24, 1923. For the four successive weeks preceding the election, a notice that included the names of the cities proposed for consolidation (Beverly Hills and Los Angeles), the date of the election, the voting precincts, and the polling place would be printed in the Beverly Hills News, “a weekly newspaper of general circulation in said City of Beverly Hills, and hereby designated as the newspaper in which said notice shall be published.”21

  The firecracker “bomb” sent to Al Murphy wasn’t the end of the publicity stunts or dirty tricks that preceded the actual election. There would be at least one more zinger pulled on the morning of April 23, 1923, the day before the election. But there would not be any more explosions. Whether or not the bomb had been an ill-conceived ploy to drum up support for the annexation cause, saner heads prevailed going forward. Beverly Hills did not exist in a vacuum. Governments around the world were still reeling from the effects of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and the tactics used during Ireland’s fight for independence from England. Acts of terrorism, which is what the incident was considered at first, made law enforcement agencies sit up and take notice. Labels like “revolutionary” accompanied things like “infernal machines” and bombs. It’s a label that’s hard to imagine anyone on either side of the annexation issue in a community of wealth and fame would want.

  Al Murphy and the Beverly Hills News didn’t last long after the “practical joke.” Within a year of acting as the newspaper of record for the election, the paper ceased operations and slipped into an oblivion so deep that not only is there no digital record of its existence, actual hard copies are for all practical purposes nonexistent as well. (The Special Collections division at the Beverly Hills Library has only one.) Al Murphy folded his tents, as it were, and slipped off into the metaphorical night. There are no records of him as a journalist after the mid-1920s. The city’s next weekly, The Beverly Hills Citizen, began publication in April 1923, about the same time the vote for annexation was taking place.

  11

  On Their Own

  As the dust settled in the aftermath of the Infernal Machine/box of firecrackers’ detonation at the offices of the Beverly Hills News, Mary Pickford and her team of anti-annexationists got to work. Regardless of how much planning went into the endeavor, their efforts had to come off as low key and grass roots, not calculated and certainly not in the public eye. Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Will Rogers, Tom Mix, Fred Niblo, Conrad Nagel, Harold Lloyd, and Rudolph Valentino had to be laser focused on the voters in Beverly Hills. The gatherings they would hold, which included picnics, meet-and-greets, photo ops, autograph sessions, and door-to-door canvassing, were not for fans, they were created for neighbors. While it was quite common for the daily papers to print announcements provided by the studios highlighting the public comings and goings of movie stars, Mary and her group’s work on behalf of keeping Beverly Hills independent from Los Angeles largely stayed out of the papers. Judging by the skill Mary Pickford had shown in manipulating the press throughout her career, the assumption can only be that this was how she wanted it. In fact, the only stories we have of the anti-annexation efforts by the Beverly Hills Eight are anecdotes from their fellow citizens.

  The famous picture folk may have been successful at keeping their efforts on behalf of Beverly Hills’ independence out of the papers for the most part, but that didn’t mean that their personal and professional lives didn’t continue to be the subject of relentless media attention. On January 28, 1923, just as the campaign for the annexation vote was getting under way, the Los Angeles Times ran “Marry in Haste, and Repent in the Courtroom,” a multipage article by Myrtle Gebhart that tracked in detail the ever-changing marital status of picture folk, and how those gyrations impacted the moviegoing public. In the article, Gebhart writes:

  “Really the man or the woman, whatever be his special line, who is successful in getting into the limelight professionally, oftentimes seems to have a penchant for attracting the spotlight quite as readily to his private affairs.

  “The film stars suffer particularly. Their art is national in appeal. Whatever concerns their personal affairs also has a big national significance. They are known everywhere personally, intimately, through their work on the screen. The stories of their matings or mismatings are featured with almost equal prominence in New York and Oshkosh. The news concerning them is always the sensation of the hour.

  “Glancing over records of a few years back I discover that Mildred Harris was then Mrs. Charles Chaplin and that Mary Pickford answered to ‘Mrs. Owen Moore.’ Owen is now married to Kathryn Perry. Doug [Fairbanks], now Mister Mary, then had another wife, a non-professional.

  “That Mary Pickford’s marital unhappiness with Owen Moore was instrumental in developing her great talent I do not believe, for hers is one of those God-given geniuses that depend upon no extraneous force but grow within themselves to flower. But certain evidences of her marriage with Doug are to be seen—in the swagger with which Little Lord Fauntleroy pranced across the screen, wherein surely Doug’s influence was disclosed.”

  The article was accompanied by an almost full-page illustration by L.A. Times cartoonist A. Zetterburg, who signed his work “Zett,” of a castle atop a steep mountain—that bore more than a passing resemblance to Pickfair—with the “Marital Happiness” at the lofty summit and the word “Divorce” placed at strategic points on the way up the craggy side and a roiling audience of moviegoers at the bottom.1

  It was exactly the kind of hometown paper coverage that Mary Pickford worked arduously to a
void. Obviously, she wasn’t always successful.

  It wasn’t just about keeping their private lives out of the media glare; a low profile in the media on the part of the stars campaigning against annexation was a good idea all around. The stars participating in the anti-annexation movement wanted to keep their outreach as one-on-one, as up-close-and-personal as possible. After their experiences rallying for Liberty Bonds during World War One, Mary Pickford and Doug Fairbanks knew better than anyone how crowds at their personal appearances could grow exponentially and get out of hand. Unlike raising money for the war effort, campaigning against annexation to Los Angeles didn’t need a critical mass; it only needed the attention of the one thousand or so Beverly Hills residents of voting age. After all, it wasn’t money for Liberty Bonds that Mary and her team were trading access to themselves for, it was votes. Not only that, when it came to the press, the last thing any of the eight celebrities wanted was for the combined words “anti-annexation” and “bomb” used in a newspaper article to be associated with them.