Remembrance of California Past

Native Angelenos speak in mirages. “Over there,” they’ll tell you, gesturing like a civil engineer, “used to be orange groves.” (They inhale deeply. You inhale deeply and gag through the smog.) “And there, my father tried to grow avocados.” (Everyone’s father tried to grow avocados.) Clear eyes and a complete set of desert crow’s feet scan the horizon. They look, in fact, like the portrait of William Mulholland, Los Angeles water czar in the early part of the last century, on the cover of his granddaughter’s new book, “William Mulholland and the Rise of Los Angeles” (University of California.)

Mulholland, mastermind behind the 240-mile aqueduct that brought the water from the Owens Valley to a questing metropolis, wears a tweed suit and a watch chain in this photo. He is surrounded by men, some with their backs turned to him. The only unstable thing in the picture is the ground beneath Mulholland’s feet--dusty, uneven, parched.

The past, in Los Angeles, is a mirage, and it has gotten many a noble historian into trouble. The temptation to make sweeping statements and create studio-worthy scenarios has tangled up minds as fiercely creative as that of Carey McWilliams in the ‘40s and, in the last decade, Mike Davis. For those who grew up here, convincing the rest of us that a strip of mini-malls and gas stations used to be a ranch must be a thankless chore. Their pasts are erased in their lifetimes, beneath their feet, as though the grim reaper was scything behind, rather than in front of them.

None of the homes William Mulholland lived in, from 1877 to 1936, is still standing. The school that Catherine Mulholland, now 77, remembers most fondly is a parking lot across from the Hollywood Bowl. The house where she lives in Chatsworth is just blocks from the 700-acre ranch she grew up on, now completely covered in concrete. “I don’t go there, no,” she says without sentiment. “It’s a bit like haunted land.”

*

“Come around midday,” she says, graciously giving the leeway to be late that is part of native etiquette. (By horse or by car, arriving on time in L.A. has never been easy.) When I arrive, it is almost the heat of the day. Mulholland, in a linen shirt and flat shoes, has her grandfather’s downcast eyes and his direct gaze. She does not stand outside, but herds me in quickly, offering homemade lemonade with mint.

Her book is surprisingly dispassionate for a book by a granddaughter. She spent the last decade meticulously researching sources ranging from the journals of lawyer Henry O’Melveny, to newspaper archives, to Mulholland’s papers at the Huntington Library. If memory can be unreliable, written records in L.A., according to Catherine, are even more elusive. “Certain primary sources are simply no longer available, gone by attrition,” she says.

Mulholland was born in Belfast in 1855, and his granddaughter encountered similar research problems overseas. “It’s a bit like being Alice in Wonderland,’ she says. “You have to move two times as fast.” There’s also the simple fact of travel: Commuting downtown from the Valley is hard enough for money, much less love.

In the course of this digging, she uncovered no lost relatives or shocking revelations. She did find additional evidence to contradict the familiar “Chinatown” myth. Letters to friends gave his granddaughter a deeper appreciation for how poetic the master builder was on paper, in contrast to the gruff power monger and land-grabber created by Roman Polanski and company.

Catherine was 12 when her grandfather died in 1936. She remembers clearly a once-proud man broken by the 1928 St. Francis disaster, when 400 people were killed by the collapse of a dam that Mulholland had designed and built. She remembers a family trip around 1930 when the car backed into a hydrant and her grandfather, the man who brought the water to the pueblo he first settled in, stood helplessly watching the torrent rushing down the road. She remembers her father, Perry, all but ordered by his father to man the Mulholland ranch, becoming the sort of manager who would fire men who let precious irrigation water go to waste.

Mulholland’s most famous remark is his grand statement when the first wave of water rushed through the aqueduct to Los Angeles. “There it is. Take it.” Less well known is his deeply moving, tremulous response to the middle of the night phone call informing him of the dam disaster. “Please, God,” he muttered. “Don’t let people be killed.”

When her grandfather died, Catherine went to live in his house on South St. Andrews Place in Los Angeles, with his widow and daughter, Rose. In high school at Marlborough, a well-meaning social studies teacher insisted that Catherine read some of the negative profiles of her grandfather by McWilliams and Louis Aramic. The accounts of a wheeler-dealer who cared little for his laborers and stole the water from the farmers of the Owens Valley to profit himself and his gang of friends, including ex-mayor Fred Eaton and Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler, didn’t fit with what she knew.

“Of course he was distant, he was a Victorian. He was supportive in the ways that a patriarch cares for his family,” she says, remembering his tweed suits redolent with cigar smoke. “I was so freckled when I was young, he used to call me his little turkey egg.” She knew her grandfather was important, because whenever he arrived at the ranch, her mother always sent her down the driveway to meet him. “He always arrived with an entourage.”

These anecdotes do not appear in the book, which is an effort to set the factual record straight. It contains a brief section on Mulholland’s “‘Angela’s Ashes” childhood in Ireland, which Catherine chose not to sentimentalize. “I can tell you that his father was a stern man, and Mulholland was frequently whipped by his father. When he turned his back on Ireland, he turned it for good.” This reminds the historian of her mother’s side of the family, determined pioneer women who, when they came West, never looked back. “It was all about the future.”

“When I left for college, I wasn’t ever coming back, either.” Confused by her grandfather’s twisted legacy, she just wanted to get away. She studied English literature at Columbia, then pursued her PhD at Berkeley, also in English. “The East Coast was quite alien to me--all that entrenched wealth and caste; even Allen Ginsberg seemed square compared to intellectuals in Berkeley.” She felt lonely among people oblivious to life west of the Hudson. She talks about how wealthy Eastern families would send their wayward children west to straighten out in a place where they could not mar the family name. She remembers an old gold miner’s tune “What was your name in the East?/Did you murder your wife? Or run for your life?/What was your name in the East?”

*

When she returned at 18, her parents agreed to let her study piano with Lloyd Reese in East L.A. It was there that she met and became friends with jazz pioneer Charles Mingus, then 19. “I remember driving in my mother’s car. We’d park, to talk, and Mingus would suddenly say, ‘Move.’ He’d see a policeman, and back then, a black man with a white woman in a car meant pimp and whore.”

Mulholland wanted to write her PhD dissertation on fiction of the West. “Subliterary,” her advisors scolded her. Black literature? “Also subliterary.” “If I could have been anything I wanted, it would have been a jazz musician.” She still plays on the same piano she played as a child. Some of her fondest memories of L.A. are from this period. Evenings at the Hotel Dunbar watching Louis Armstrong and Ornette Coleman. Nights at the Hollywood Bowl production of “Midsummer Night’s Dream” with Mickey Rooney as Puck and Olivia de Havilland as Titania. “It seems to me that before the war we were starting to integrate better,” she muses of race in Southern California. “All this rising emphasis on ethnicity seems divisive.” Mulholland raised three children in Berkeley in the ‘60s. She was married to Gerald Hurley, an English professor. Her son William, “my most dedicated rebel,” now supervises the construction of sound systems in jet airplanes. Daughter Katy is saving otters in Ventura County. Her daughter Christine, who inherited the political genes, is running for City Council in San Luis Obispo.

Mulholland is on the board of Cal State Northridge and participates in a nonprofit study group, “Water and Power Associates,” composed mainly of “old water buffalos.” She stays current on water issues and has little patience, for example, with Valley residents who want secession from Los Angeles.

One of her children wired some flowers on publication of the book. The boy who delivered them asked Catherine, “Are you related to the road?” “It was named for my grandfather,” she told him. “Oh, what did he do?” the boy asked. Mulholland gets this a lot. A few days ago, at the hairdresser, a woman complained to Catherine about rising electricity rates. “They’re even asking us to cut back on air-conditioning,” the woman said indignantly. “I let her have it,” says Mulholland, looking like her grandfather. “When I was growing up and we turned the tap or flicked a switch, we knew how precious it was. My mother remembered a time when the water was so hard you couldn’t make soap suds.

“I feel dislocated in the L.A. of today,” she admits. “The world I grew up in has vanished. I go hot and cold. It’s a very difficult city to live in and understand, and yet it’s a dynamic, fascinating, important city, full of flux and uncertainty.” She walks me to the car. We look up and down a street that is empty in the midday heat. She is thinking of moving back to Berkeley. “I am a gregarious person,” she declares, “and frankly, not to be vulgar, I’ve had a bellyful of suburbia.” Her California shimmers on the concrete and off the rocks she scrambled over as a child.