Granddaughter Sees Mulholland’s Vision

Bring up the most melodramatic moment of “Chinatown” and Catherine Mulholland may well react with a hearty laugh. That’s the scene in which a tearful Mrs. Mulwray is getting slapped around by private eye Jake Gittes as she explains the existence of a certain teenage girl.

“She’s my daughter.” Slap! “My sister.” Slap! And so on, until the startling revelation that she is both.

The granddaughter of the legendary William Mulholland has a rich sense of humor. But in the final analysis, Catherine Mulholland, the 74-year-old author of two books about San Fernando Valley life in the early 20th century, “Calabasas Girls” and “The Owensmouth Baby,” takes offense at both the fictional “Chinatown” as well as many supposedly factual accounts of the great Los Angeles water saga.

Hollywood and pop historians, she says, have been cruel to her grandfather, frequently portraying the man who made modern Los Angeles possible as a key player in a grand conspiracy to steal water from the Owens Valley and thereby make Valley land barons wealthy.

He died when Catherine Mulholland was a child growing up in the Valley. That was decades after the triumphant opening of the aqueduct and years after the tragic collapse of the St. Francis Dam, which he designed, killed more than 400 people.

Catherine Mulholland figures it’s up to her to set the record straight. After living most of her life in the Bay Area, the self-described Berkeley liberal returned to the Valley several years ago to work on a biography of her grandfather. She lectures occasionally on the subject.

The truth, she insists, is at once epic, heroic and tragic but, in her grandfather’s case, nothing so tantalizingly sinister. A history told chronologically and in the context of the times, she says, reveals her grandfather to have been a progressive visionary who believed in great public works for the greater public good. She faults influential writers such as Carey McWilliams for uncritically accepting the socialist perspectives of Job Harriman, an early 20th century Los Angeles mayoral candidate.

Catherine Mulholland seems both appalled and fascinated that, at the century’s close, some Angelenos still speak accusingly of her grandfather. “I mean,” she adds dryly, “I assume they bathe.”