Something Lost, Something Gained
I grew up in a place that has vanished, in a world that can be recalled by only a very few. Where a ranch of walnut and citrus groves once flourished, there is now a branch of Washington Mutual, an Olive Garden and a Stuart Anderson’s Black Angus. Asphalt blankets the ground where our walnut dehydrator once operated and a K-Mart covers the site of my childhood home.
My life in the 1920s and ‘30s was a country life--our ranch, situated between Chatsworth and Northridge, comprised 700 acres--but we enjoyed a proximity to the city and the relatives who lived there. We moved back and forth between the rural and urban, experiencing the best of both. In fact, at the age of 8, I wrote a composition titled “The Advantages of Los Angeles,” which began:
“It is a pretty place. There is good climate here. There is plenty of water. You can farm in the city limits. You can grow almost everything on these farms. We grow many, many oranges, walnuts and grapes.”
My move into adolescence and early adulthood paralleled the growth of the City of Angels as it struggled with its own maturity. As the city became more urban, I became more urbane. I encountered Hollywood at its most glamorous, Central Avenue jazz at its peak and the early stages of suburbia when development seemed a promise rather than a threat. I attempted to reconcile public and private perceptions of a man who was once heralded as L.A.’s greatest water czar, my grandfather, William Mulholland.
Then, for 35 years, I lived in other places, only to return to a world not of my making. Now, after 20 years back in my native land, I wonder if I could write an essay titled “The Advantages of Los Angeles.”
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I was born in 1923, the eldest of three children to grow up on the Mulholland Orchard Co., which was acquired piecemeal by William Mulholland and then developed and managed by my father, Perry. My grandfather paid between $50 and $150 for an acre of land; today that land costs more than $150 per square foot. My mother, Addie Haas Mulholland, was a child of Calabasas homesteaders. After moving with her family in 1912 to the newly founded town of Owensmouth (now Canoga Park), she traveled over the Cahuenga Pass on the Big Red Cars to attend Hollywood High School. When she graduated in 1915, fewer than 10,000 people lived in the San Fernando Valley.
After my parents’ marriage in 1921, they lived and worked on the ranch until my father’s death in 1962. By 1970 all the land had been sold; the place of my childhood disappeared beneath the tidal wave of change driven by the dreams of a postwar society. My last walk with my mother through our empty home felt like death, and I hastened my departure so as not to encounter the arrival of the undertaker. Nor is our ranch the only lost family landmark; the dwellings of my great-grandparents, grandparents and parents exist only in memory and in a few fading images in photo albums. All were swept away in the deluge of development during the 1950s and ‘60s.
Change came more slowly during the depressed 1930s. On hot summer nights after Sunday dinner at the ranch, we sat outside under the stars and listened to the old ones remember. Their stories stretched from the time of the Civil War, when the first generation arrived in Los Angeles, up to my childhood years. Of course, by the 1920s, the dominating figure of our clan was my Dublin-born grandfather, William Mulholland, who had arrived with his brother in the pueblo of Los Angeles in 1877. By the time of my childhood, he had achieved in the building of the Owens River Aqueduct, completed in 1913, both fame and opprobrium. That aqueduct, later opposed by residents of the Owens Valley, nonetheless transformed the semi-arid San Fernando Valley into a major agricultural hub. Some called him a dictator, but I remember a gruff yet kindly old man who seemed chiefly interested in what I was learning at school.
We were a family who loved stories and talking, and those animated recountings of past events formed in my consciousness great archeological layers of past times in the city: It could be my dad remembering boyhood trips with his younger brother Tom and his father during the building of the aqueduct: “In Mojave, Dad always checked for bedbugs before he’d let Tom and me get into bed. Mojave then had the reputation of being the wickedest place in the West, and I believe it was.” (Construction workers on the aqueduct flocked to Mojave on weekends to be parted from their paychecks in the saloons, bawdy houses and gambling joints that flourished there.)
* Or my mother would recall how in 1917, while teaching in the one-room Calabasas grade school along the old Ventura road (today, the 101 Freeway), she would allow the children to run out to watch a car go by.
* Or we’d laugh over Auntie Rose’s dramatic account of her humiliating encounter with her adolescent heartthrob, Lewis Stone, then a young local matinee idol who achieved later fame as Mickey Rooney’s father, Judge Hardy, in the Andy Hardy films. On her way home from the market with a large fish wrapped in paper, she had stopped by the theater to purchase an advance ticket only to encounter the stage star face to face. As he doffed his hat and bid her good day, she, overwhelmed with shy confusion, let slip the fish, which then fell at his feet.
And where was my Grandfather Mulholland in all this? Although a noted raconteur among his cronies, he was often a silent listener at these family gatherings, especially after the 1928 St. Francis Dam tragedy ended his public life and blighted his spirit.
Life on our ranch embraced a country quiet broken only by the sound of an occasional car bumping along the dirt road in front of our house (Corbin Avenue, north of Nordhoff Street), the grinding of a tractor plowing in the orchards or the mournful train whistles of the Southern Pacific trains whose tracks ran through part of our acreage. Sometimes my mother would have to pull her car off the dirt road to allow a shepherd to drive his flock through on the way to pasturage in the northern foothills of today’s Porter Ranch. When very young, I believed the shepherd to be Jesus, but when told he was not, announced that he must then be Jesus’ wife.
Although the ranch was the little kingdom of my childhood, it did not constitute all my existence. My great-grandfather Isaac Ijams subdivided his ranch in Studio City (west of Laurel Canyon Boulevard and north of the Los Angeles River) in the 1920s and built a fine new home in which his widowed daughter, my grandmother, lived and kept house. In addition to its attractive proximity to the Los Angeles River, which could be explored and visited, the old Ijams property lay west of Laurel Canyon across from a eucalyptus jungle that we called the Gum Grove. Used as a location site by filmmakers, a little girl friend and I once watched Clark Gable and Jean Harlow as they worked on “Red Dust” (1932). Every morning we waited for the stars to arrive for work, Gable in a maroon Packard convertible with the top down; Harlow in a midnight blue coupe with a rumble seat.
The main drama, however, centered on my theft of Gable’s pigskin driving gloves from the front seat of his open roadster. When I bragged of my prize to my grandmother (I was almost 9 at the time), she made me return them, following me all the way back to the car to see that I did so. The sheer terror of possibly being apprehended by Mr. Gable as I flung the gloves back into his car decisively ended any thoughts of a life of crime.
Hollywood seemed pervasive and its stars sometimes floated into our ken. Certain youthful sightings remain memorable: Boris Karloff thoughtfully selecting salad greens at a Farmers Market produce stand; Greta Garbo eating lunch with a girlfriend at the Bullock’s Wilshire Tea Room; and the dramatic appearance of Marlene Dietrich at our piano teacher’s annual recital, this one in June, 1935, at the Beverly Hills Women’s Club at Chevy Chase and Benedict Canyon drives. Attired in men’s dinner dress, the star entered with her daughter and an entourage including husband Rudolf Sieber, director Josef von Sternberg, a liveried chauffeur and a governess dressed like a character from Bemelmans’ “Madeline.” Daughter Maria’s participation was the occasion of this spectacle but Dietrich upstaged us all. Our parents were put off by the theatrical performance, but I found her quite splendid, especially as she fluttered among us backstage afterward, bestowing compliments and providing treats of Chapman’s ice cream (the best in the world!).
Schools, then as now, posed problems for ambitious parents. In my parents’ quest for “better schools,” I became something of an academic vagabond, at one point, staying with my maternal grandparents in Studio City to attend North Hollywood Junior High. Although I eventually graduated from Canoga Park High School in 1940, I lived for two years in the home of my late Grandfather Mulholland on South St. Andrews Place and attended Marlborough School for Girls.
Although I had always been a reader, once I discovered I could go to the Central Library at 5th and Hope streets simply by taking the 3rd Street streetcar downtown, I became voracious. As my reading expanded, so did curiosity and doubts. My tastes were catholic and sometimes apparently beyond the pale. I recall one librarian who would not allow me to borrow the works of Havelock Ellis and Sigmund Freud without a written consent from home. I was too young, she told me; I was 14 and it was the first time anyone had tried to censor what I read.
Just as disturbing were certain writers who called into question my heretofore uncritical pride in the accomplishments of my Grandfather Mulholland. When a high school teacher suggested that I read “Dynamite,” by Louis Adamic, along with various writings by Carey McWilliams, I was sobered and perplexed by their muckraking exposes of those whom they regarded as the exploitative overlords of Southern California. In their versions, William Mulholland’s engineering skills were dismissed as they focused on his allegedly sinister role in the power and money-making chambers of the city. These accounts were so at variance with what I had believed that a great confusion came over me. When I left Southern California to attend UC Berkeley, I welcomed the anonymity of a place where my name had no particular significance.
In these years of increasing complexity, I had become a jazz lover and after years of playing classical piano, wanted to learn something about the art of improvisation. After an illness during my freshman year at Berkeley, I came home to convalesce for a semester, and, to avoid boredom and idleness, prevailed upon my parents to allow me to study with a man who changed my life. His name was Lloyd Reese, he was black, he lived at Jefferson Boulevard and Maple Avenue, and he was a great musician-teacher and critic. In that brief time of study, the world of Central Avenue opened to me: the music, the people, the society so carefully segregated from the world in which I had existed.
It was then that I, a girl of 18, met and made a lifelong friend of Charles Mingus, then a youth of 19 but destined to be a great and famous musician. Our long conversations about life and music took place on the streets of East Los Angeles in the front seat of my mother’s car (the only place we felt an interracial pair could safely talk without being rousted by a cop). Once he took me to his home in Watts, but later told me his mother was so upset to have a white girl in the house that he couldn’t ask me back. He was more courageous than I, for I would never have dared suggest that he come home with me.
My involvement in the interracial night life and jazz world of Los Angeles led to social confusions that I was too immature to deal with, so my return to university life offered a welcomed escape hatch. I left for UC Berkeley somewhat in the spirit of Thackeray’s anti-heroine, Becky Sharp, who threw her gift dictionary out the coach window as she coolly departed Miss Pinkerton’s academy for young ladies. In a sense, I threw the book at L.A.
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My return to live here after 35 years in New York and Berkeley was somewhat in the manner of Rip van Winkle, for whom so much had been lost.
My only Mulholland cousin, Lillian Sloan Macedo, and I recently recalled the inroads of time as we talked of those days when we had both lived at 426 S. St. Andrews Place, only a few blocks from the magnificent Wiltern Theater. It had been our custom to walk there after dinner to see an early movie and then, before strolling home, to stop at the nearby fabled Chapman’s Creamery for cones. Our leisurely amble took us along peaceful residential blocks of prosperous homes, the night air redolent of freshly watered lawn grass. Nothing broke the tranquillity of those peaceful nights except the whoosh of an occasional passing car or an encounter with a neighbor out strolling or walking a dog. We both concluded we would not attempt such a stroll today.
Something lost, yes. But also something gained. My life has been rich because of Los Angeles and continues to be so. To have lived to see the rise of a great city and to know that one’s forebears played roles in its history is a precious heritage. Of course, Los Angeles is not always a lovable place. The recent rise of a certain siege mentality troubles me: gated communities, NIMBYs, secessionists. Yet candor compels me to remember that in my youth there were those who would keep out the Dust Bowl victims from Oklahoma and Arkansas, and neighborhood covenants then excluded all who were not white. My grandparents and parents had lived through the days of Oriental Exclusion Acts and the hysteria of the “yellow menace.” And only after WWII were legal prohibitions against interracial marriages at last struck down.
I agree with Carl Sandburg that the ugliest word in the English language is “exclusive.” I still cherish the words of the lady in Watts, who, after the 1965 riots, proclaimed, “Don’t move. Improve.”
A few years ago while doing research at the Huntington Library, I enjoyed the company of a musicologist from Durham, England, who was an avid observer of Los Angeles and Southern California. One day at lunch as I complained of our worsening traffic conditions and found myself waxing nostalgic over the days when one could reach one’s destination more swiftly than today, he replied: “I can understand your frustration, but what strikes me as remarkable about your city is that it does seem to work.” I thought it a hopeful remark. So let us look with wonder on where we have been, reflect on where we are and then turn to the horizon and imagine where we can go.