Widow of Litton Leader Gives $25 Million to USC

As a young woman during the Depression, Flora Laney Thornton loved to sing. Full of pluck at age 22, she left the Methodist Church choir in Fort Worth for New York, where she sang in two Broadway musicals.

Then she married a boy from back home, Charles B. “Tex” Thornton. For the next 41 years, she was the dutiful wife of the corporate visionary who co-founded Litton Industries. “Music,” she said, “was not on the docket in my marriage.”

Since her husband’s death in 1981, Flora Thornton has been rediscovering her first love, this time as a patron of the arts. She’s a supporting “angel” of Los Angeles opera. She offers scholarships for voice students. And beginning today, the USC School of Music will bear her name, in recognition of her gift of $25 million.

“I guess it’s coming full circle,” said Thornton, 85.

It was 1935 when Thornton left Texas with “talent, but very little training” for New York to study voice. “I was in town six weeks and had an Actors Equity contract singing in a small Broadway musical,” she recalled. “It was a play without a chorus, so all of us sang as well.”

During her marriage, Thornton took an interest in other things, including medicine. That’s reflected in gifts that established the Flora L. Thornton Community Health Education Program at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, the Flora L. Thornton Chair in Preventive Medicine at USC’s medical school and the Flora Laney Thornton Professorship in Nutrition at Pepperdine.

“Even though I grew up in the arts, I didn’t see singing as an important endeavor,” she said. “I always saw it as a dilettante endeavor.” Now, she said, “I have come to place it in a different category.”

The gift gives a big boost to USC’s Thornton School of Music, often ranked as one the best in the country. Its strength comes from its broad mix of the traditional with the more contemporary, offering degrees in every orchestral instrument, classical guitar, composition and music history, as well jazz studies, studio guitar and scoring for motion pictures.

In the fall, the Thelonius Monk Institute of Jazz and its Jazz Masters fellowships will move to USC from the New England Conservatory of Music.

“This is a very exciting moment in the school’s history,” said Dean Larry J. Livingston.

Thornton’s gift is the kind that universities love: all cash, no strings.

The money will be placed in the music school’s endowment, and earnings will be used to improve the school’s twin specialties of training 1,000 undergraduate and graduate students in the rigors of classical music and preparing them to enter today’s music industry, Livingston said.

“The school is a model for the university on how to combine the classical and timeless with what’s going on today,” said USC President Steven B. Sample. He takes great pride, he said, in USC’s role of training musicians, arrangers and composers who are helping Los Angeles emerge as the music entertainment capital of the nation.

It was Sample, perhaps USC’s best fund-raiser, who first suggested that Thornton make a large donation to the music school. She invited him to speak to the board of directors that runs the Flora L. Thornton Foundation.

When he suggested a gift of $25 million, Thornton balked. That kind of donation would all-too-quickly deplete the foundation’s reserves.

“I let it drop for a few months,” she said. “But it kept haunting me.”

Thornton’s careful management of her husband’s fortune has generated millions to underwrite the passion of her youth.

Thornton gave $1 million to the Walt Disney Concert Hall, which is scheduled to open in 2002. She has been a major supporter of the Los Angeles Music Center’s Opera and the Santa Fe Opera.

She developed an ongoing relationship with the USC music school by setting up a scholarship for graduate students in voice. The first recipient, Jessica Rivera, and Thornton have become “very good friends.” Rivera is now an apprentice at the Santa Fe Opera, but visits Thornton often at her home in Holmby Hills.

All of this worked on Thornton’s mind as she realized that if her foundation could not afford to give $25 million she could draw from her personal fortune.

“I thought the size of the gift was not out of line and I was in a position to do it,” Thornton said. “My children are taken care of and I will not go hungry.”