Underdog

Underdog. The word alone says it all. Rich in struggle, long in effort, it hints at some unspoken nobility, some quiet vindication. Look it up in the dictionary, and there’s a picture of a boy in a log cabin learning to read by the light of a fire. Stories of strivers--those who started with nothing and reached great heights--have long been our propaganda, our come-on to the world. Some are bright and miraculous, fueled by luck and hard work. Others are dark and sinister, driven by greed and obsession. As much as they are stories of the American character, they are also snapshots of a particular time and place, and few places have held more promise than Los Angeles. Backwater, gold mine, melting pot and paradise--here, more than anywhere, destiny has been our own creation. Stories of the city’s underdogs go back to the first great land boom in the 1880s and march on to the front pages of our newspapers today. Drop into their lives for a single moment--when strangers met, an idea was born, a big break came--and realize that success is an art form, reward the mere byproduct.

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1880s-1910s

HELEN HUNT JACKSON 1830-1885 Writer

On May 4, 1883, Helen Hunt Jackson sat down to write a letter. She had been in Los Angeles for almost three months and had taken a room at the Kimball Mansion, a boardinghouse on New High Street. If she was tired, she showed no signs of weariness. If she was angry, then her prose was stronger for it. “My opinion of human nature has gone down 100 per cent in the last thirty days,” she wrote to Thomas Bailey Aldrich, editor of the Atlantic Monthly. She had watched winter turn to spring while visiting Indian tribes in San Bernardino and Riverside, and her head was swimming with their plight. “Such heart sickening fraud, violence, cruelty as we have unearthed here--I did not believe could exist in civilized communities.”

Jackson was no stranger to heartache. She had buried a husband and her only two children. Out of grief, she traveled, and out of necessity, she wrote: criticism, editorials, poems and fiction. Though she saw great romance in Southern California, she didn’t know how to write that book--until now. “I had not got the background,” she continued. “Now I have, and sooner or later, I shall write the story. If I could write a story that would do for the Indian a thousandth part what Uncle Tom’s Cabin did for the Negro, I would be thankful the rest of my life.”

“Ramona” was published in 1884 and has never been out of print.

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BIDDY MASON

1818-1891 Midwife

Free. No word so simple was so complicated. How could the children ever understand that? They were just babies back then, five years before the war, seven before Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Sitting in her home on Spring Street, listening to a rain that’d been falling for weeks, Biddy Mason remembered a city that, just 28 years before, was practically another country. That was back in 1856. She was 38 then, born a slave. Mr. Smith, her owner, wanted to take her and the others to Texas--just as he’d done before, walking them first from Mississippi to Utah in ‘49, sagebrush to snowy peaks, and then to the land of yuccas and Joshua trees, San Bernardino, two years later. He didn’t mistreat them, but he was a restless man. And he wanted to find a place where the Southern style of living was better understood.

Only the L.A. sheriff had a few concerns. How do you transport Negroes from a free state to a slave state? It wasn’t a simple question, so they were taken to the courtroom and sat there listening to Smith and his attorneys try to explain it away. Finally Judge Hayes asked Mason’s opinion. “I have always done what I have been told to do,” she testified. “I always feared this trip to Texas since I first heard of it. Mr. Smith told me I would be just as free in Texas as here.” That was all Hayes needed. Smith was guilty of misrepresentation. Mason and the others, the court said, were “entitled to their freedom and are free forever.”

After her emancipation, Biddy Mason started working for $2.50 a day as a midwife in L.A. She invested $250 in savings in two downtown lots. At the time of her death, her property was valued at $300,000--equal to more than $6 million today.

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I.W. HELLMAN

1842-1920 Banker

The city was in panic. Streets were crowded, police everywhere, and in front of each bank, long lines had formed. It was the first day of summer and the second day of the bank run of 1893. Herman Hellman sat at his desk at the Farmers and Merchants Bank, waiting. The lobby was still packed. Clients with bankbooks in hand were calling for their deposits. The day before, Herman had sent his brother in San Francisco a telegram: “Come with money.”

Isaias and Herman Hellman had arrived from Bavaria in 1859 with $30 in their pockets. In those years, Los Angeles was but a smudge on the map. Herman worked for transportation baron Phineas Banning. Isaias opened a dry goods store, and in 1868, he formed one of the city’s first banks. Now L.A. was lousy with them, and each was foundering. It was well past noon. Then Herman heard some shouting. “Hellman is in town. Hellman is in town.” Isaias stepped through the doors, accompanied by armed guards carrying heavy sacks. As he set himself up behind the counter, he stacked the shiners for all to see. It was just enough to help calm the panic and for Farmers and Merchants to continue on.

When he died, I.W. Hellman’s bank had assets exceeding $35 million--about $375 million today.

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EDWARD DOHENY

1856-1935 Oilman

At 60 feet, the stench nearly overpowered them. They had been digging for almost 40 days, bucket after bucket of tarry soil. Now at their feet lay a rich deposit of oily, gassy shale that convinced Edward Doheny and Charles Canfield that they were on the right path.

They had dug every day, all day during that fall of 1892. They had struggled to come up with the $400 lease on that miserable plot of land, bubbling near the intersection of Colton Street and Glendale Boulevard, and they tested their friendship. Canfield had his doubts. Doheny never wavered. Lured to California from New Mexico, where his luck in the mines had run out, he had hoped to turn a dollar on the region’s fabled real estate market. But he arrived too late. The boom had collapsed.

He was close to broke, 36 years old, coming home each night to his wife and their 7-year-old daughter smelling like Hades. Home was a low-rent boardinghouse at the corner of 6th and Figueroa whose residents had come to Los Angeles hoping to catch a break but had found none. Still, it was from the front porch that Doheny had noticed a horse-drawn wagon carrying a load of soil to be burned as fuel at the ice plant, and it was here that he saw his future.

So he pushed himself--beyond the death of his daughter in December, beyond Canfield’s growing reservations, beyond the splintering collapse of the derrick. And finally, on April 20, 1893, the drill bit stuttered to a stop at 185 feet. “Let’s pull her out!” Doheny yelled to the operators. When they did, the bit was soaked in oil, and by the next morning, all their barrels were filled.

By 1924, Doheny was reported to be one of the richest men in America, with a net worth of more than $150 million--more than $1.5 billion today.

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1920s

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EARLE M. JORGENSEN

1898-1999 Steel salesman

The afternoon had slipped into evening, and it was time for dinner. Earle Jorgensen had spent the day on the phone making the usual calls, first to the shipyards trying to pick up their scrap metal, then to the machine shops trying to offload it. He grabbed his hat and stepped outside. He’d be back at it in an hour or so, once the stenographers were gone and he could use their typewriters to process his orders.

This was his routine ever since he’d arrived in Los Angeles and set himself up in the Douglas Building on the corner of Spring and 3rd. The days were long, but he was accustomed to hard work. As a boy, he’d sailed around the Cape. He’d survived the San Francisco earthquake, took his first job at 15, gone overseas during the war and was ready to begin. It was 1921. The streets near Angels Flight were crowded. Jorgensen frequented a dollar diner near 1st, and on the way back to the office, waiting to cross the street, a stranger stepped up, introduced himself and invited the younger man to dinner. The next night over steak and pie a la mode, John Davis made his intentions clear.

“Son, I want to help you out,” he said. “You meet me tomorrow morning at the Citizens National Bank at the corner of 5th and Spring, and I’ll make a little loan to you.” The next day, Jorgensen had a check for $20,000, which he doubled in less than a week.

At its peak in 1979, Earle M. Jorgensen Co. manufactured and distributed a range of steel products, ringing up close to $400 million in sales.

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DONALD DOUGLAS 1892-1981 Aeronautical engineer

On a midsummer day in 1920, five aeronautical engineers from Ohio peered into a small barbershop in Santa Monica looking for a friend of theirs. At first they thought they had the address wrong. They’d quit their jobs to come west, lured by the prospect of working for Donald Douglas. He’d come to L.A. four months earlier from Cleveland. Douglas wanted to build airplanes, and he knew Southern California was the ideal place. It had a big sky and perfect weather. So what that he had only $600? He washed cars, hoed potatoes and plotted his future. Eventually he got what he needed: $40,000 from a millionaire sportsman who wanted to build a plane that could fly nonstop, coast to coast. It would be called the Cloudster.

The five engineers looked around. Several men in front of them were getting haircuts. In the back room, Douglas rose from a drafting table covered with a T-square, triangles and French curves. “I’m not sure of anything,” he had written to one. “I expect, however, to work up a strong business . . . and have something worthwhile in another year or so.”

By 1944, Douglas Aircraft Co. had six factories and 130,000 employees and was worth more than $50 million.

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EARLE C. ANTHONY

1880-1961 Automobile salesman

Earle Anthony wasn’t so poor. His father was a banker with enough money to send his son to Berkeley for college. Yet it was a stretch for Anthony to buy his first auto dealership in 1904. He scraped together a couple of grand. And by the ‘20s, he had a string of Packard dealerships throughout the state.

Still, he hadn’t realized his dream--until this moment.

When the phone rang at the Packard dealership on the corner of Olympic and Hope, Bank of America was on the line. The branch manager wanted to vet an unusual request.

“Mr. Anthony wants to withdraw $1 million . . . right now.”

The dealership’s vice president asked if Anthony’s account held that much. When the banker replied that it did--and then some--the VP said, “Well, I suggest you give it to him.”

A bit later, Anthony walked into the dealership with a satchel. “How did you get here?” the VP asked.

“I walked.”

“You walked all that way with $1 million in cash. Why?”

“Because ever since I was 10 years old, I wanted to carry $1 million in cash down the street.” Anthony then asked the VP to call the bank so it could retrieve its money.

In 1963, Earle C. Anthony’s estate, which included radio station KFI, was valued at more than $14 million.

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AIMEE SEMPLE MCPHERSON 1890-1944 Minister

Aimee Semple McPherson was accustomed to hearing the Lord, but his largesse puzzled her. On one especially dark day, he had told her that her little girl would not die, and she hadn’t. He had also promised her a bungalow in Los Angeles, and not long after arriving here in the winter of 1918, she listened to all those miraculous offers from her congregation, one after another, to build a two-story home with gabled porches and a brick chimney on Orange Grove Drive. So when she was called out on the road again--San Francisco, Baltimore, Dayton, San Jose, Denver--she didn’t understand.

“Dear Lord,” she asked, “wouldn’t it have been better, if You had placed our little home somewhere in the East or Middle West, where it would have been more accessible?”

Then one day in 1921, she came to understand his plan. She had driven her Oldsmobile out on 3rd Street toward Echo Park. She had never seen this part of the city, and at the corner of Park Avenue and Glendale Boulevard stood an empty lot near a park with a lake lined with palms, willows and eucalyptus. Swans sailed among the waterlilies. “Why,” she thought, “this is heaven on earth.” Aimee Semple McPherson raised more than $1 million to build the Angelus Temple. It’s still home to one of the city’s largest ministries.

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1930s

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ORVON GENE AUTRY

1907-1998 Singing cowboy

Gene Autry loved to drive. He had to. It was the only way he could make a living. Cutting records in one town, singing in a Kiwanis club in the next, he knew “more back roads than a bootlegger.” From Tioga, Texas, where he was born, to Chicago, where he caught his first break, the Midwest was his backyard and bank account. So when he slipped into his Buick in 1934, headed for California, Route 66 was an open promise. He’d been cast in a movie, “In Old Santa Fe,” with a barn dance scene. He was to be the caller.

Squeezed beside him were his wife, Ina Mae, and his buddy, Smiley Burnette. In the back were two guitars and one accordion. “Ridin’ Down the Canyon” was written in Arizona; they said it took three miles to finish. The movie work was just as simple. He got paid $500, but when he saw the early film footage, he was ready to run. He thought he looked terrible, sounded worse. “To hell with it,” he told Ina. “California,” he later wrote, “struck me as formless, too sprawling, too far from the rest of the country.”

Gene Autry moved to Hollywood for good in 1935. He was in 93 films and 91 episodes of his TV show, and built a broadcasting and baseball empire.

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EARL SCHEIB 1908-1992 Automotive painter

Running was just a reflex. That’s why he had that tiny window installed in his back office, so when the bill collectors came, he’d see them, and by the time they reached the secretary, he’d be gone. Besides, he was only a little late with the payments, and everyone knew that you had to risk a little to gain a little. Did people really think those advertisements--big full-page affairs in The Times and the Examiner--came free? And then there was the radio and television. “Hi, my name is Earl Scheib, and I’ll paint any car, any color for $29.95. No ups! No extras!”

It began in 1937. He’d come to Los Angeles from San Francisco when he was 10. Mom did laundry for people; dad worked as the house dick at the Biltmore. Good German stock. His first job was to drive a Chris-Craft across the Catalina Channel. Then there was a stint at General Petroleum in Arizona, and when dad died, he went into the gas station business on the corner of Whitworth and Fairfax. One day a customer asked if they could paint his car. Why not? So rather than taking off the chrome, the bumpers and door handles, he just masked it off. That saved time, saved money. Let others charge $300 a job; he’d be the Henry Ford of the car-painting business.

At its height in 1985, Earl Scheib Inc. had 273 stores on two continents.

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JAMES D. (DOUG) EASTON

1907-1972 Sporting goods manufacturer

You could always find Doug Easton in a crowd. Thin as a rail, he walked with a slight limp, and on weekends during the archery tournaments at Griffith Park, there was usually a crowd around him. Twenty-four dollars for a dozen arrows. Bows from $9-$36. You couldn’t do better.

Strange how it all began. He was 15, hunting quail when the shotgun nearly took off his leg. He was laid up for nearly a year. That’s when he discovered Saxton Pope’s book “Hunting with the Bow and Arrow.” He thought he’d done a decent job of making them when an old man approached him in Golden Gate Park--and it turned out to be Dr. Pope.

Easton followed his parents to L.A. in 1932. By day, he delivered newsprint, and at night he made his archery equipment out of his garage on Halldale Avenue. He’d get the turkey feathers and cedar and start planing and filing and sandpapering the shaft down to aerodynamic perfection. Before long, he had his own small warehouse on 5th Street and was taking orders from Errol Flynn. Soon, he quit his day job. His wife, Mary, kept the books and on weekends fixed picnics for the tournaments in the park.

Doug Easton trademarked an aluminum arrow shaft in 1946 and 23 years later produced an aluminum baseball bat that is ubiquitous today.

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WALT DISNEY

1901-1966 Commercial artist

“Really, it’s quite a strange atmosphere to me--I can’t conceive of it belonging to us,” Walt Disney wrote in 1933. His wife, Lilly, and he had just moved into their new Los Feliz home, the one with the swimming pool carved out of the hillside. The Depression had hit, and yet he’d still found success. Lilly was pregnant, Mickey had gone international, and he felt guilty. “It seems all right for somebody else to have those things around, but not for us,” he continued. “I presume I’ll have to get used to it.”

The memories were still fresh. It was Kansas City, Mo., the summer of ‘23, the bitter end of Laugh-O-Gram, Disney’s first animation studio. He had thought there was money to be made in laughter, but he was wrong. He owed his landlord for back rent on the office and was in arrears for his room on Charlotte Street. His credit had run out at the local cafe. He had started to sleep on a roll of canvas and cushions and bathed for a dime at the train station. At 21, he was about to declare bankruptcy, and he needed to get out of town. For two weeks he went door to door looking for parents who might want their children filmed. He made up to $15 a shoot. He eventually sold his camera. Summertime in Kansas City can be sweltering, yet on this late July morning, Disney put on his black-and-white checkered jacket and mismatched trousers and grabbed his gabardine coat and an old brown cardigan. In his cardboard suitcase were clothes and animation equipment. He had nothing more to lose.

In 1928, Mickey Mouse made his debut.

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1940s

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RUTH AND ELLIOT HANDLER

1916-2002 Saleswoman

1916- Toy designer

“Oh, my God. What the hell is going on?” It was late 1943, and a letter from the Selective Service was the last thing Elliot Handler needed. Then he turned to Ruth. “We’ll get by, one way or another,” he assured her. Two kids from Colorado, they’d been at it since ‘37, scraping by at first. She worked in the steno pool at Paramount, and he studied industrial design at Art Center and worked for a lighting manufactuer. They brought in $42 a week, just enough for Elliot to buy a band saw, drill press and sander. Finally he quit school. “You make it and I’ll sell it,” Ruth told him.

He had a knack for giftware--lamps, picture frames, jewelry. He’d make his molds in the garage and then soften and shape the acrylic on the stove. Eventually they were kicked out of their apartment. Too much dust, the landlord said. But it wasn’t a bad thing. He opened a shop on Olympic, and Ruth took time off to sell. It was the lapel pin, the one with the hand holding a small vase, that got them started.

After Elliot Handler returned from the Army, he and Ruth started Mattel Creations in 1945 with Harold Matson. They introduced the Barbie doll in 1959.

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JACKIE ROBINSON 1919-1972 Baseball player

Jackie Robinson was feeling good. It was Sept. 5, 1939. It had been a difficult summer. His brother Frank was gone, killed in July in a motorcycle accident, but that was far from his mind as he drove down Fair Oaks Avenue in Pasadena. He’d just been playing softball in Brookside Park and was behind the wheel of his ’31 Plymouth, with some of his friends clowning around on the running boards. As he pulled up at Mountain Street, however, another car came along- side. The driver said something about “the niggers.” Then someone slapped someone. It was the start of a fight. Robinson stepped into the middle of it, and when a policeman arrived, he didn’t back down until he found himself with a gun barrel pressed into his stomach. The next day the Star News carried the story. “Jackie Robinson, Negro athlete from Pasadena Junior College who is now headed for UCLA, was in police court this morning charged with ‘hindering traffic’ and also with resisting arrest. Robinson pleaded not guilty to each of the two charges.” It was his second arrest in Pasadena, the first one also suspect and racially charged.

In 1949, Jackie Robinson was named the National League’s Most Valuable Player.

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SIMON RAMO

1913- Physicist, engineer

He had heard that Howard Hughes was the richest man in the country, but he was not easily impressed. So when colleagues persuaded Simon Ramo to visit Hughes Aircraft Co., he agreed only as a courtesy. It was spring 1946. A graduate of Caltech, Ramo had been working for GE in New York for 10 years, yet was eager to return to California. The bureaucracy was stultifying--no creativity, no risk-taking--and Ramo had always played risk to his advantage.

Like when he was 15, a senior in high school in Salt Lake City. He’d stocked shelves at his father’s J.C. Penney, but $10 a week wouldn’t get him through college. So he jumped at the chance to perform in the Intermountain High School Contest. Only he had to improve his odds. The oboe, bassoon and piccolo players always stole the spotlight, so Ramo decided to drop his $300 savings on a European violin. When he took the stage that day in 1929, he nailed it: Bach, Mendelssohn, De Beriot. He won a full scholarship.

Seventeen years later, however, inside that hangar in Culver City, he saw what real risk-taking was all about. The H-4 looked like a flying ocean freighter. Ramo knew he’d be a fool to walk away from this.

In 1953, Simon Ramo left Hughes Aircraft and the Spruce Goose, and within five years helped form TRW.

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JOHN WAYNE

1907-1979 Movie actor

Reporters. Always reporters. There was no getting away from them-- especially at a time like this. Josie and he had been sweethearts, together for 16 years, married for nine. Of course they’d quarreled. What couples didn’t? “I was working so damn hard, and I thought I was doing the right thing then. Jo and I just drifted apart.” And now they were separated, and he was out stumping for his latest picture, “The Spoilers.” It was 1942. John Wayne had finally hit the big time, contracts and offers pouring in. And yet here he was miserable, separated, away from his kids and with scant hope of a divorce because of Josie’s Catholicism. Could this be how his father had felt? Always a failure to his mother. Too sick. Too easy a mark, offering credit to customers at the pharmacy in Iowa, too weak-willed to demand getting paid back.

No question that moving to the high desert of Southern California had been a mistake, even if dad’s lungs needed the relief. No running water, the outdoor privy, a wood-burning stove and kerosene lamp. Home in Lancaster was just a shack, surrounded by jackrabbits, rattlers and coyotes. If father had one bullet, Wayne would say, then he’d better shoot two rabbits so the family could eat that night.

Two years later, when the crops failed, the family sold the homestead, bought a Model T and moved to Glendale. Wayne was only 9 and already an accomplished horseman. By the making of “The Spoilers,” he’d ridden hundreds, falling off and getting back on countless times. In 1945, John Wayne and Josie finally divorced. He’d marry twice more and, after “The Spoilers,” star in 72 other pictures.

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1950s

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DALIP SINGH SAUND 1899-1973 Politician

The campaign was bitter. Strangers attacked him. Even friends attacked him. And the message was always the same. “Doc, tell us,” asked the man in the coffee shop, “if you’re elected, will you furnish the turbans or will we have to buy them ourselves in order to come into your court?”

“Well,” said another, “you’re a kind of an American, I suppose, but I can trace my own origin to a family that came over on the Mayflower.”

Dalip Saund, however, had faith in a country that had little faith in him. He’d come from a village in Punjab in 1920, eager to get out from under the heels of the British and enamored with the writings of Lincoln and Wilson. He was 21. He had a doctorate in mathematics from Berkeley, and in the summer of ‘25, he headed to the Imperial Valley. He thought he’d try a little farming. He couldn’t own land; the Alien Land Law saw to that. So he joined a cotton-picking gang, calculating payroll. He was, after all, good with numbers. Eventually he leased a plot, but when the price of hay dropped, he ended up owing $8,000. Too proud to declare bankruptcy, he worked his way back. Work. That’s all it took. “I don’t care what a man has on top of his head,” he told those at the coffee shop. “All I’m interested in is what he’s got inside of it.”

In 1956, Dalip Saund became the first Asian American to be elected to Congress.

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RAY KROC

1902-1984 Salesman

“Ray, I’m afraid we are in deep trouble.” They were words that Ray Kroc feared the most. In the fast-food franchising business, the weakest link was the owner-operator. Until now, from 1955 to 1959, everything had worked out just fine. Suddenly, though, Kroc had a big problem: Seven stores in Wisconsin and two in Ohio--a 10% expansion of the McDonald’s empire--were sitting half complete, the contractors demanding to be paid. The franchisee was nowhere to be found.

“How much money are we talking about?

“Well, Ray,” his associate told him, “it’s going to be at least $400,000.”

“Jesus!” Kroc’s net worth was only $90,000.

It had once seemed so simple, like the day in ’54 when he had driven 60 miles east of Los Angeles to San Bernardino to that little drive-in owned by the McDonald brothers, with their eight Multimixers and the 15-cent hamburger. That night in his motel room, Kroc had done a lot of thinking. “Visions of McDonald’s restaurants dotting crossroads all over the country” danced through his head, “Multimixers whirring away and paddling a steady flow of cash” into his pockets.

So how could he be on the verge of bankruptcy? It had never been this bad, even early on, playing the piano, selling real estate, peddling paper cups all over Chicago.

“Ray, I have an idea . . . .” With a little creative financing, his associate suggested, the company could be saved. Adversity, Kroc later wrote, can strengthen you if you have the will to grind it out.

With more than 30,000 restaurants, McDonald’s today serves some 50 million people in more than 119 countries.

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SIMON RODIA

1879-1965 Tile setter and stonemason

So many beginnings and so many endings. Only this time it was for good. Simon Rodia was moving on. For more than 30 years, he had made this tiny wedge of dirt his home. For more than 30 years, he had tried to make something beautiful here, and no one seemed to understand. Children threw rocks at him and his towers; the scavengers tried to pick off his pretty stones and glass. To hell with all of them. He was heading north to be with his sister. And the towers? He didn’t care. Nuestro Pueblo was no more.

Nearly 60 years earlier, in another century, Rodia had left southern Italy and immigrated to the United States. Legend has it that he was an elevator operator, worked in coal mines, gravel quarries and railroad camps--from Pennsylvania to Seattle to Oakland to El Paso--before finally settling in Southern California. Perhaps he drank and played around too much, but back then he was young and life just blossomed around him. Like the way he left Benita and Lucy and wound up with Carmen. Now it was that lot on 107th Street and that treeless sky so wide, so huge and perfect for spiraling upward. Carmen didn’t last, either, but his dream did. “I had in my mind to do something big, and I did,” he said.

Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers became a national historic landmark in 1990.

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MARILYN MONROE

1926-1962 Movie actress

There was pandemonium on the set. Director Howard Hawks couldn’t believe it. “Shutterbug! Oh, Shutterbug!” she screamed, right there in the middle of a scene. It was 1953, and Marilyn Monroe was Lorelei Lee in “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.” Shutterbug was David Conover, a bespectacled man in a baggy tweed suit. “I didn’t mean to interrupt,” he said.

“Silly, you haven’t,” she said, taking him by the arm and making introductions. “This,” she announced, “is the photographer who discovered me working on an assembly line.” It was less than 10 years earlier, well before the drama coach and acting classes, the work and the study she rarely got credit for. Back then, she was 19 and had been bounced around from foster parents to her mother to friends to an orphanage and, finally, to a husband. Conover discovered her when she was working in a small Burbank aircraft company, inspecting and folding parachutes. He’d gotten the assignment to shoot publicity shots. It was just another job. Then he saw her: curly ash-blond hair, face smudged with dirt. Norma Jean cleaned up nicely. “Half child, half woman,” he wrote, “her eyes held something that touched me and intrigued me.”

“Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” was Marilyn Monroe’s 20th film. She’d star in 10 more after that.

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1960s

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WARREN CHRISTOPHER 1925- Attorney

Los Angeles had exploded. For six days in August, Watts was a war zone, and afterward--with 34 people dead, an estimated $40 million in property damage--the question was this: How could it have happened? The answer lay with the McCone Commission, whose vice chairman was a 40-year-old attorney from O’Melveny & Myers. He’d been schooled at USC and Stanford, but when Warren Christopher put pen to paper, his real contribution was his memory--and sense of empathy.

Born in Scranton, N.D., Christopher had seen the hardship endured by Depression-era farmers. He had watched his father, the town banker, agonize over their fates. In 1939, he had helped the family move to California after dad was incapacitated by a stroke. The Christophers lived in a duplex in Hollywood, where Warren slept on a pullout bed in the dining room. Mom worked at Sears, and he threw the Hollywood Citizen News from a blue bike with fat balloon tires. A $300 scholarship from the University of Redlands would finally lift him up and out.

In 1991, Warren Christopher headed an investigation into police brutality within the LAPD. In 1993, he became U.S. Secretary of State.

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LEW WASSERMAN

1913-2002 Studio executive

By 1964, Hollywood’s newest mogul was coming into his own.

The Universal lot had been torn down and rebuilt into a city. It had its own post office, fire department, sewer system, PT boats, hitching posts and lobbyists. Movies were being made more efficiently, television was hitting its stride, real estate was king, and the competition was toast. Lew Wasserman, chairman of Universal parent MCA, was in heaven. He drove a Bentley with vanity plates, took to wearing pinkie rings, and from where he stood on the 14th floor of the Black Tower, that beanpole from Cleveland’s east side was nowhere to be seen.

Not too shabby for someone whose first real job was at a burlesque house, where he walked the aisles at intermission, trying to sell candy and ice cream. Heck, he thought he’d arrived when, two years later, he started working at Keith’s, a Cleveland theater. He was the doorman, decked out with brass buttons and gold-braid epaulettes. No more wearing hand-me-downs from his older brother; he was now in charge. And once the lights dimmed, he felt himself transported. The warehouses and factories that lined the Cuyahoga River, his parents’ orthodoxy and his older brother’s epilepsy faded away. The future shone through the darkness.

In 1990, Lew Wasserman sold MCA to Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. for $6.13 billion.

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RUDI GERNREICH

1922-1985 Fashion designer

Everything happened so fast. First it was in Look, then Women’s Wear Daily, then Newsweek and, finally, Life. Never mind the cover story--”Oswald’s Full Russian Diary with Photos”--this was the summer of the topless swimsuit, the summer of ’64.

Peggy Moffitt wore it, arms crossed, her eye shadow as dark as the offending maillot. The reaction was immediate. The Kremlin, the Vatican and American clergy denounced it, while 3,000 women purchased it. Rudi Gernreich could have hardly cared. Freedom of expression was the way out of oppression.

It was what he had learned when he and his mother fled Vienna in 1938, six months after the Anschluss. He was 16. They landed in L.A. and moved into a rental on Alexandria and 3rd. It was difficult losing their lives and language, but Gernreich loved Southern California: the sun, the swimming pools. Mrs. Gernreich--her husband had died when Rudi was 8--rented out rooms and baked cakes. Rudi delivered them and worked as a sketch artist at RKO. He loved to dance but was sidelined by a heart condition. So he returned to drawing. It reminded him of his childhood, when he drew designs in his aunt’s dress shop.

Other Gernreich innovations included the chiffon see-through T-shirt dress and the No-Bra bra.

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CAROL BURNETT 1933- Comedian

CBS had forgotten. “It’s in the contract,” she reminded them.

“Look,” the network executive said. “How about a sitcom?”

“Well, no, not really, because I really don’t want to be the same person week after week, and I love music. I love guest stars. I love to do sketches.”

“Well,” the executive said, “women don’t do that.”

But Carol Burnett did, and they relented. Monday nights at 10, opposite “I Spy” and “The Big Valley.”

And with that, she went to work. There was the charwoman to dust off, lollipops for Shirley Dimple to slobber over, shoulder pads for her Joan Crawford, and by the time the first episode aired in 1967, it was well-rehearsed madness. Just what life had prepared her for.

How else could you explain being on welfare with your grandmother--her books by Mary Baker Eddy, her aspirin, milk of magnesia and phenobarbital--and owing her everything? How else could you account for the push-me-pull-you love she felt for two divorced parents who seemed more lost than found? How else might you explain the thrill of climbing the Hollywood sign with Durante crooning in your head, “Ya wanted to stay, yet ya wanted to go . . . .”? She always knew Broadway was just around the corner. TV quickly followed. Pulling an ear can be pretty subtle, but her Nanny always got the message.

“The Carol Burnett Show” ran for 11 seasons.

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1970s

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YVONNE BRATHWAITE BURKE

1932- Politician

The television cameras were fixed on the young black legislator from Los Angeles. Yvonne Brathwaite Burke stood on the podium, gavel in hand, calling to order fellow Democrats busy wrestling over their platform, whether Humphrey or McGovern could best put Nixon away. It was Miami, July 1972. The Watergate Hotel had just been burglarized, and Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, the daughter of a janitor and a real estate broker from Los Angeles, had stepped into the national spotlight. Six years earlier, at 33, she had been elected to the state Assembly, and when she’d gone to rent an apartment in Sacramento, the landlord turned her down.

But Burke learned at an early age the meaning of perseverance. Her parents had come to California from Texas in 1921. They bought a duplex on Washington Boulevard between Central and Hoover. No one had money then. If there were people who didn’t put cardboard in their shoes, she didn’t know them. In the fourth grade she transferred to the 32nd Street School. All the other kids there were white, except for the other girl called a nigger for being half-Latino. But they had names for these kids too. Okie and Arkie worked. It all evened out.

In 1972, Yvonne Brathwaite Burke was the first black woman to be elected to Congress from California. In 1992, she was elected to the L.A. County Board of Supervisors, on which she still serves.

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TOM PETTY 1950- Musician

One night in the spring of 1978, a 53-year-old cabbie named Albert Ruiz wove his way down Hollywood Boulevard. The radio was tuned to KHJ. Player, Andy Gibb, Kiss--they all blended into one, and then magic: the opening riff of “Breakdown.” “Tom Petty!” shouted Ruiz. “That song is my girlfriend’s favorite. Is rock and roll, man!”

As it was for Ruiz, so it was for America. Tom Petty had come from Gainesville, Fla., where his father jumped from job to job and his mother worked for the tax collector. There was drinking. There was fighting, and then one Christmas, they gave their son a cheap acoustic guitar. He was 12, formed a band, eventually toured with Lynyrd Skynyrd and decided California was the place to be. The Heartbreakers landed in ’74. Record companies flourished. A&M;, RCA, Capitol. In a phone booth at Ben Frank’s, Petty got the number of Shelter Records. Eventually they signed him. Weeks turned into months. Living on advances. Hanging out in seedy motels. Trying to make something happen in the studio. Then one night, 2 a.m., “Breakdown’s” descending chords miraculously appeared. Even the losers get lucky sometimes.

“Breakdown” hit Billboard’s Top 40 in October 1977. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers were elected to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002.

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SHERRY LANSING

1944- Studio chief

Of course it wasn’t easy, reading scripts, making $5 an hour, but what choice did she have? Her marriage had ended, and her lifelong dream of acting had collapsed on the outskirts of Tucson, on the set of “Rio Lobo.” It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Movies were to be her salvation. Judy Garland, Susan Hayward, Gregory Peck--they had gotten Sherry Lansing through the long weekends growing up on Chicago’s South Side, especially after her father died. Naturally, she and her husband made Grauman’s Chinese Theatre their first stop when they came to California in 1966.

They took an apartment on Kenmore near Vermont. Her plan seemed foolproof: She’d teach kids in Watts and East L.A., then head out for auditions. No one had to know that a gas station was her changing room. The Max Factor and Alberto Culver commercials weren’t high art, but they were a beginning. Then she had to drive out to the desert and scream herself hoarse to have the kind of voice the director wanted. If this was acting, she wanted nothing more to do with it.

In 1972, after three years as a script reader, Sherry Lansing got her big break when she read Michael Crichton’s “Coma.” In 1979, she was named president of 20th Century Fox, becoming the first woman to run a studio.

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DAVID GEFFEN 1943- Record producer

David Geffen had felt relaxed, confident when he met with Esquire magazine in 1974. Thirty-one years old, the chairman of Elektra/Asylum Records, boyfriend of Cher, he had the world on a string and had no compunction about taking his boots off and walking down 5th Avenue in his socks. His feet ached.

But it was the story that really hurt. It was so mean-spirited, like everything else written about him--incidents blown out of proportion, conversation taken out of context. Take the mailroom episode.

Ever since he was 12, Geffen had dreamed of being another Louis B. Mayer, the Rajah of Hollywood. But what were his chances? He was just this scrawny Jewish kid from Brooklyn who liked movies, slept on a couch in his parents’ flat and was an easy target for lunch money. His mother worked out of the apartment, making ladies’ undergarments, and his father, in his 50s, started a long decline toward death, which happened about the time that Geffen graduated from high school, tried his luck in L.A. and returned home. He was 21 and had been fired from a couple of jobs when he was shown the door at the Ashley-Steiner Famous Artists agency for not having a college degree. No wonder that when he applied for a position in the William Morris Agency mailroom, he had reason to be nervous. So what that he lied on the application about having a theater arts degree from UCLA? So what that he intercepted the letter from the university refuting the claim? Who’d he hurt?

In 1994, David Geffen joined Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg to found DreamWorks. They sold it this year to Viacom for $1.6 billion.

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1980s

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OSCAR DE LA HOYA

1973- Boxer

Easy money, the guys in the gym said, 25 bucks a day if you’re lucky. And if anyone was lucky, it was Oscar De La Hoya. Ever since his father put him in the ring in Pico Rivera, he’d never lost a fight. Still, at age 12 he knew there was no future in boxing. His father had done it, but that hadn’t lasted. Dad was now a warehouse clerk. No, boxing was just something to do to win a trophy and a little recognition.

Meanwhile, Oscar figured he could make this work. The math alone was enough to convince him. Fifty ice creams, 50 cents each, $25. It was summer, 1985. He got an early start that day. He wanted to get to the gym that afternoon.

He picked up his cart and dry ice and popsicles from the company on Whittier Boulevard. By noon, having sold just one bar, he headed over to Ford Boulevard Elementary School, where the kids would be getting out from summer school. He waited there for almost two hours and nothing happened--except that he learned that of all the flavors, lime squares were clearly the best.

Oscar De La Hoya’s professional record stands at 38-4.

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DR. DRE

1965- Record producer

Eve After Dark had it going. From the moment Lonzo Williams started working the club at the corner of Avalon and El Segundo, there was no turning back. It was the early ‘80s. Funk and disco were all that mattered. Pay the cashier, step behind the curtains and just forget about it. You’d be knocked flat by the heat--so hot the windows sweated--and the lights and the sound and the dancing, always the dancing, a hundred bodies grooving.

So, of course, Andre Young wanted in. So did Eric Wright. It was the place to meet the ladies. Yet Williams stopped them every time. They never paid attention to the dress code. But Young had a plan. He was like that, the kid from the projects who was always looking ahead.

Eve had some of the best DJ’ing equipment in town. And Young was practiced. The first night he put “Please Mr. Postman” and “Planet Rock” on top of each other. The place went off the hook. Soon he was Dr. Dre, Wright was Eazy-E, and Williams was selling their music out of the back of his RX7, its rear bumper scraping the ground from the weight of the load.

“Straight Outta Compton” hit the charts on March 4, 1989. In less than two months it peaked at No. 37, going gold at the same time. By July it had gone platinum.

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DAVID TRAN

1945- Hot sauce entrepreneur

By the time David Tran arrived in Los Angeles in the spring of 1980, the slate had been wiped clean.

As his grandfather had left China, so had Tran left Vietnam. Wandering seemed the family’s fate. Of course, the American War was to blame. And life had gotten worse after the fighting ended. Ethnic Chinese had never had it easy in Vietnam, and in ‘78, Tran planned his family’s escape.

He converted his savings into gold and made the arrangements. Ten ounces to the government. Two ounces to the ship captain. The family divided into separate groups, better to ensure the survival of at least some. One left in July, another in August, another in September. Tran stepped aboard the Huy Fong the third week of December 1978. The voyage to Hong Kong was cold and windy. The refugees, close to 3,000, were packed tight. Tran lived on instant noodles. Was it three or four days? He lost track.

Six months later, he met up with his wife and son. Eventually the family flew to the United States. First Boston, then L.A. He wanted to make hot sauce. The first month he delivered $2,300 worth out of the back of a Chevy van.

Last year, Huy Fong Foods Inc. posted worldwide sales of about $20 million in chili products marked with the familiar rooster label.

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ROBERT H. SCHULLER 1926- Pastor

At its dedication in 1980, the Crystal Cathedral was filled beyond capacity. It had taken nearly three years to build. Architect Philip Johnson estimated that it would cost $7 million. He was $10 million short, but raising money never seemed to get in the way of Robert Schuller’s vision. One Sunday, when the collection plates were wheelbarrows and cement buckets hanging from construction cranes, he raked in $1.4 million. “There is never a money problem,” he was fond of saying, “only an idea problem.”

Solutions had seemed to come easily since the moment he arrived in Southern California in his ’53 Chevy sedan. He’d been here before as a student and fallen for the mountains, the palm trees, the ocean. Now he needed a church. Lacking one, he accepted a drive-in theater. On Sunday, March 27, 1955, he climbed a wooden ladder to the roof of the concession stand and restroom facility. His cross was two 1-by-10s hammered together. Fifty people in 30 cars were before him, and overhead the clouds slid silently through the sea of space. “But Jesus beheld them, and said unto them, ‘With men this is impossible; but with God all things are possible.’ ” By day’s end, he’d raised $83.75.

Last January, Schuller’s son, Robert A., took over as senior pastor of Crystal Cathedral.

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1990s - 2000s

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EDITH PEREZ

1954- Lawyer

It must be a mistake, she thought. She didn’t know Riordan from Adam and had supported Woo. Yet here he was, the mayor, asking her to serve on the board of the Recreation and Parks Commission. What sense did that make? But Edith Perez had come to accept that sometimes things just work out. It was what Mr. Cinnamond might have said--if he’d been more philosophically inclined. He was her principal, a man as big as Perry Mason, who clearly had other things to worry about when he asked for her help just weeks before the start of sixth grade.

September is a difficult month for the children of migrant workers in Sacramento Valley towns like Marysville, where Perez grew up. The summer harvest is over, and families chase the apple season north. Friendships are lost, schooling stops, and Cinnamond wanted to do something about it. He wanted Edith to explain to the families the importance of keeping their children in school. Perez was only 11, having come from Mexico with her family when she was 1. She spoke Spanish and English, and she got it. When she climbed into that big black boat of a car that Cinnamond drove, dressed in her red plaid skirt, white collar and Mary Janes, she knew someday she would surpass even Mr. Cinnamond. Not just reach him but surpass him.

In 1993, Edith Perez became the first Latina partner at Latham & Watkins. Two years later she was named to the Los Angeles Police Commission.

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NOBU MATSUHISA 1949- Restaurateur

Sometime between “The Untouchables” and “Goodfellas,” Robert De Niro ate at a small sushi bar on La Cienega. The black cod with miso was unlike anything he’d ever had. A few years later, in 1994, he picked up the phone. “So, Nobu, how about it?”

Nobu Matsuhisa had arrived in L.A. in 1977 with $24, a bag of clothes, $200,000 in debts and an entree to the owner of a Japanese restaurant on Pico and Overland. He lived apart from his wife and two babies, taking a one-bedroom apartment on Sawtelle. He bought a car, but it was stolen. He rode a bike, but that was stolen too. And now he had the greatest actor in America offering him a place on Hudson Street in Tribeca. Beginnings always brought a twinge to Matsuhisa.

When he was 7, he’d lost his father in a motorcycle accident. When he was 18, he’d begun his apprenticeship. When he was 24, he’d opened his first restaurant in Lima. Then there was Buenos Aires. Then Alaska. There was no forgetting Alaska. The whirl of light snow. Thanksgiving 1977. Flames shooting into the sky. He’d scraped and borrowed and sweated that place into existence, and then it was just charred timbers and brick. The papers estimated $75,000 damage, but that didn’t figure in the loan, a debt that would be with him for years. “What are you going to do now, Nobu,” he heard himself asking. “What can you do?”

Nobu Matsuhisa owns 16 restaurants worldwide, including three in New York. De Niro is an investor in many of these.

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CESAR MILLAN

1969- Dog trainer

The water was cold, but Cesar Millan knew that this was his break. The Sinaloa native had waited two weeks in Tijuana. He was almost 21 and heading to the land of Lassie and Rin Tin Tin, where all dogs spoke English. He’d met a friend who worked at Senor Frog’s, crashed in the back room and tried to hang onto his $100. On his first try, the border guards caught him and threatened to kick him so far south he’d have to speak penguin to get home. They lied of course, and after giving him a sandwich, dropped him back in TJ.

He was more careful after that. One day he went to a canal and watched the exodus. There was a rope. An old man slipped. People screamed. Millan thought of his grandfather, the man who had taught him so much about animals, and he turned away. Then one night a skinny guy approached him outside a coffee stand. America could be his for only $100. They ran to San Ysidro, and when the migras came close, they hid in a pool of water. “Hey, Juan,” the guards called, trying to fool them into answering. Millan and his coyote didn’t move, and when the red lights disappeared, they started up again.

Cesar Millan became a legal resident in 2000. “Dog Whisperer With Cesar Millan” debuted on the National Geographic Channel four years later.

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ALICE SEBOLD 1963- Writer

The phone call was polite enough. Henry Dunow, a literary agent in New York, was on the line. It was 1998. He was calling to say that he’d just finished her manuscript. He went on and on, until she finally had to stop him. Some 20 years of writing--moving from Syracuse to Houston to the East Village to California, working as a bartender, a teacher, drinking, taking drugs, trying poetry, trying fiction, trying anything to get it right and nothing quite working--hadn’t prepared Alice Sebold for this moment. “Are you saying,” she asked sheepishly, “that you want to represent me?”

Dunow did, and then he sold Sebold’s memoir, “Lucky.” But it still wasn’t easy. Stories of rape, no matter how brilliantly told, never are. After a dozen or so rejections, Scribner finally picked it up for something in the low five figures. Perhaps, Sebold dared to think, this was the start. In the end, though, “Lucky” really wasn’t. Critics called it “unsentimental” and “razor sharp” upon its publication in 1999. But good reviews aren’t always enough, and when it came time for the paperback, no one stepped forward. For Dunow it was a familiar experience: a lifetime dream of publication, and when it finally happens, there’s no ticker-tape parade. Your life hasn’t changed. For Sebold, living in Long Beach with her husband and Lily, their shepherd mix, it was a blow. And so here she was, starting all over again. Only this time she was writing a novel.

Nearly 10 million copies of “The Lovely Bones” have been sold since its publication in 2002.

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SOURCES:

Biddy Mason: Interview with Donna Mungen (“The Life and Times of Biddy Mason”); Delilah L. Beasley’s “The Negro Trail Blazers of California”; Lynn Bowman’s “Los Angeles: Epic of a City.”

Helen Hunt Jackson: Interview with Kate Phillips (“Helen Hunt Jackson: A Literary Life”).

I.W. Hellman: Interview with Frances Dinkelspiel, Hellman’s great-great-granddaughter and author of the upcoming “Towers of Gold: Isaias Hellman and the Creation of California” (St. Martin’s Press).

Edward Doheny: Interview with Margaret Leslie Davis (“Dark Side of Fortune: Triumph and Scandal in the Life of Oil Tycoon Edward L. Doheny”); Caspar Whitney’s “Charles Adelbert Canfield.”

Aimee Semple McPherson: Aimee Semple McPherson’s “The Story of My Life”; Daniel Mark Epstein’s “Sister Aimee: The Life of Aimee Semple McPherson.”

Donald Douglas: Interviews with son James; grandson Jamie Douglas; Boeing Co.’s Patricia M. McGinnis; T.A. Heppenheimer (“Turbulent Skies”); Wilbur H. Morrison’s “Donald W. Douglas.”

Earle M. Jorgensen: Interview with Earle Jorgensen, February 1992.

Earle C. Anthony: Interview with Earl Rubenstein, president of the Earle C. Anthony Packard Motor Car Club; Stuart Blond’s “The Earle C. Anthony Biography.”

Orvon Gene Autry: Interview with Michael Duchemin of the Autry National Center; interview with Holly George-Warren (“Public Cowboy No. 1: The Life and Times of Gene Autry,” Oxford University Press, 2007); Gene Autry’s (with Mickey Herskowitz) “Back in the Saddle Again.”

Walt Disney: Interview with Neal Gabler (“Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination”); Bob Thomas’ “Walt Disney”; Russell Merritt and J.B. Kaufman’s “Walt in Wonderland.”

Earl Scheib: Interviews with Chris Bement, CEO, Earl Scheib Inc.; Earl’s son Don Scheib. James D. (Doug) Easton: Interview with son Jim Easton, chairman of Easton-Bell Sports Inc.

John Wayne: Ronald L. Davis’ “Duke: The Life and Image of John Wayne.”

Ruth and Elliot Handler: Interview with Elliot Handler; information from Mattel Inc.

Simon Ramo: Interview with Simon Ramo; Ramo’s “The Business of Science.”

Jackie Robinson: Arnold Rampersad’s “Jackie Robinson: A Biography.”

Ray Kroc: Ray Kroc’s (with Robert Anderson) “Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald’s”; John F. Love’s “McDonald’s: Behind the Arches.”

Marilyn Monroe: Donald Spoto’s “Marilyn Monroe”; David Conover’s “Finding Marilyn: A Romance.”

Simon Rodia: Interviews with John Outterbridge, former director of the Watts Towers Arts Center, and Bud Goldstone (“The Los Angeles Watts Towers,” with Arloa Paquin Goldstone).

Dalip Singh Saund: Interviews with Inder Singh, president of Global Organization of People of Indian Origin; Ellie Ford, Saund’s daughter; Dalip Singh Saund’s “Congressman from India.”

Carol Burnett: Interview with Carol Burnett; Burnett’s “One More Time: A Memoir.”

Lew Wasserman: Interview with Kathleen Sharp (“Mr. and Mrs. Hollywood: Edie and Lew Wasserman and Their Entertainment Empire”).

Warren Christopher: Interview with Warren Christopher.

Rudi Gernreich: Interviews with Peggy Moffitt, Gernreich model, and Lilly Fenichel, a friend of Gernreich.

Yvonne Brathwaite Burke: Interview with Yvonne Brathwaite Burke.

Sherry Lansing: Interview with Sherry Lansing.

Tom Petty: Paul Zollo’s “Conversations with Tom Petty”; BAM (Bay Area Music) June 1977 and April 7, 1978.

David Geffen: Interviews with Bones Howe, record producer, and Steve Binder, producer-director; Stephen Singular’s “The Rise and Rise of David Geffen”; Tom King’s “The Operator.”

Dr. Dre: Interviews with Lonzo Williams, producer, and Times staff writer Terry McDermott (“Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics,” Los Angeles Times Magazine, April 14, 2002).

Oscar De La Hoya: Interview with Oscar De La Hoya.

Robert H. Schuller: Interview with Robert H. Schuller; Schuller’s “A Place of Beauty, A Joy Forever.”

David Tran: Interviews with David and son William Tran.

Nobu Matsuhisa: Interview with Nobu Matsuhisa; Matsuhisa’s “Nobu: The Cookbook.”

Cesar Millan: Interview with Cesar Millan; Millan’s “Cesar’s Way.”

Alice Sebold: Interview with Henry Dunow, literary agent.

Edith Perez: Interview with Edith Perez.

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Times librarians Vicki Gallay and Suzanne Oatey assisted with research for this issue. Michael Shaw, Elizabeth Padgett and Nathan McIntire assisted with fact-checking.