A Bright and Guilty Place: Murder, Corruption, and L.A.'s Scandalous Coming of Age (8 page)

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Beverly Hills C.S.I.

I
n the early 1900s—when President William McKinley was gunned down in Buffalo by the anarchist Leon Czolgosz, when America danced to the syncopated beat of ragtime and women’s dresses still brushed the ground, when the automobile was already transforming the life of the century and E. L. Doheny was at last achieving the sort of wealth of which he’d always dreamed—Doheny had decided he needed a nearby getaway place, a haven where his family could ride horses or enjoy a picnic. He bought 400 acres of land south of the San Gabriel Mountains, several miles from downtown, in an area that was then just countryside: Beverly Hills. As the years went by, and Beverly Hills became populated and a desirable location for residences, Doheny built houses for various family members on his 400 acres. In 1926, after one of his Teapot Dome acquittals, he planned a house for his son Ned, daughter-in-law Lucy, and their five children. Not just any house: this would be the grandest in L.A., rivaling any personal residence in the United States. Doheny gave fifty or so of his Beverly Hills acres for a site and held a competition before settling on society architect Gordon B. Kaufmann to do the design, which turned out to be mock-Tudor, but on a military scale. “The huge (over 46,000 square feet), magnificent structure rose high over Sunset Boulevard, sited on a promontory,” writes Margaret Leslie Davis, Doheny’s most recent biographer. “Its grounds would include an enormous stable (close to 16,000 square feet), dozens of riding trails, a two-bedroom gatehouse, formal gardens, terraces, a sixty-foot swimming pool, several greenhouses, badminton and tennis courts, and a waterfall that cascaded down an eighty-foot-high hillside before filling an artificial lake gloriously landscaped with white water-lilies. The estate’s interior was equally awe-inspiring: it contained several Georgian fireplaces, a thirty-seat motion picture theater, a two-lane bowling alley, a recreation room and a gymnasium, a walk-in fur and jewelry vault, a temperature-controlled wine cellar, and a billiard room with a hidden bar that, in this Prohibition era, retracted into the wall at the push of a button …. Greystone’s three-foot-thick gray Indiana limestone walls gave the mansion its name. Its steeply pitched roof, framed with steel-reinforced concrete, was covered with solid Welsh slate. Many of the windows of the home featured an inspiring view from downtown Los Angeles to Santa Monica Bay.”

The mansion was completed in late 1928, at a cost between three and five million dollars (worth perhaps fifty times as much today). Greystone cost plenty, but then Doheny had plenty, and the building and stuffing and staffing of the mansion no doubt provided a welcome distraction from the imbroglio of Teapot Dome. The writer Raymond Chandler would in time get lots of mileage out of the Dohenys; their story fascinated him—haunted him, it’s fair to say—and Greystone appears as the home of General Sternwood in The Big Sleep and the Grayle residence in Farewell, My Lovely, in which he writes: “The house itself was not so much. It was smaller than Buckingham Palace, rather grey for California, and had fewer windows than the Chrysler Building … and inside, if you could get inside, a special brand of sunshine, very quiet, put up in noise-proof containers just for the upper classes.”

If you could get inside … In Mexico, Doheny had hired an army to protect an entire region against insurgents and unpredictable revolution. In Los Angeles, he turned the family homes into fortresses. “Beverly Hills residents came to regard Greystone as a self-contained principality,” writes Margaret Leslie Davis. “The estate had its own gatekeepers, watchmen, mechanics, house staff, field crews, and even its own fire station. A neo-Gothic garage, which housed ten of Ned and Lucy’s cars, featured its own gas pumps, lifts, and machine shops. Among the staff were cooks, housemaids, a kitchen maid, laundresses, a maintenance worker, a painter, ten gardeners, four chauffeurs, and two operators who ran Ned’s two telephone switchboards.”

Among the staff … Even the wealthiest can’t work or live alone—not if they wish (like the Dohenys did) to live with style and show. Cocoons are really only effective for the recluse. For a while Doheny Sr. employed as one of his private secretaries a smart, educated young woman named Miriam Lerner, the daughter of a department-store owner, a girl from a good family. No doubt the fact that she was gorgeous helped too. Lerner was a mistress of the photographer Edward Weston, and became the subject for some of his most famous nude studies. Among Lerner’s other lovers was a young artist and beginning screenwriter, John Huston. In the early 1930s, while living in the South of France, she helped Emma Goldman write her autobiography. At this time, in the late 1920s, she turned her Los Feliz house into a salon for writers, artists, bohemians, whose money problems she soothed by fixing cushy jobs with the Dohenys. Thus, the future bookdealer Jake Zeitlin trimmed the Greystone lawns, and for a while Louis Adamic had jockeyed gas from a Greystone pump.

All this was innocent; and perhaps Doheny knew of, and smiled at, the game beautiful Miriam Lerner was playing. But the urge for self-containment and self-protection sometimes has ironic, unforeseeable consequences. Even if you build a fairy-tale palace with, as Margaret Davis notes, “a gift room where Lucy Doheny could wrap fabulous presents for her family, friends, and staff at Christmas time,” you still live with whatever perhaps not-so-fabulous gifts that are unknowingly seeded within. Much can be controlled by money, but not everything—not even by $300 million. E. L. Doheny discovered this on that fateful night in February 1929—for his son was killed by a member of his staff, a trusted and put-upon servant.

“With the accelerator squeezed against the floor boards, I raced my car through the semi-deserted streets of Hollywood and Beverly Hills to the palatial Doheny mansion on Doheny Drive,” wrote Leslie White. To his amazement he found the estate surrounded—not by the police but by private detectives, another of Doheny’s armies. A Times photo taken later that morning shows the men still in place around Greystone, toting pistols and shotguns.

“It would be simpler to crash Buckingham Palace,” wrote White, making the joke that Chandler would later tweak and polish. Three of the guards stopped White at the gatehouse, barring his entry until word came down and they waved him on. “I drove up to the house and was admitted by one of those frozen-faced butlers, properly and immaculately garbed despite the hour and the tragedy.”

Once inside White set down his camera and equipment for a moment, took off his spectacles and polished them. He was struck by the silence as Greystone’s hushed solid-stone splendor heightened the weird reality, almost surreality, that attends murder’s official aftermath. Whole teams of law enforcement spoke to each other in whispers. This, as it happened, was the first murder the newly formed Beverly Hills Police Department had faced, though neither the Beverly Hills cops nor the L.A. County Sheriffs’ Department deputies, who were also there, showed any desire to claim jurisdiction over a case that was clearly explosive and filled with career-ending potential. So the D.A.’s office had taken over, in the commanding shape of Lucien Wheeler.

While at Notre Dame, Lucien Wheeler had been on the rowing crew and had played in the brass band. He was a handsome, powerful man of medium height. He had large, shrewd eyes, a small mouth, and huge skills. As head of the U.S. Secret Service’s presidential guard, he’d ridden on the running boards of automobiles, keeping a watchful eye for anybody who might step out of a crowd and try to assassinate Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. He’d visited Los Angeles as early as 1911, as the advance man for President Taft, meeting the railroad people, the police, the organizers of the parades, and the managers and bellboys of the hotels where the president would stay. He arranged the guards and plotted the routes and the guest lists. In 1929, at age fifty-three, this subtle and unflappable man was the most experienced and accomplished law enforcement guy in L.A. The brash young Leslie White was a little in awe of Lucien Wheeler.

“He met me in Greystone’s huge hallway and calmly briefed me,” White wrote. “He told me to do my work and report back only to him.”

White, small and intrepid, lugged his gear down a long, dim corridor, and went through a door into a guest suite. On the floor he saw not one corpse, but two. “They were just as dead as any of the score or more ‘bindle-stiffs’ I had found in the jungles,” White wrote. He used the term “bindle-stiff,” slang for the victim of a drug overdose, to give the impression that he’d seen scores of corpses, and he had; nonetheless, beneath the tough-guy pose, he was shaken. Here was violent death, frightening and intimate. “In a luxurious bedroom lay the corpse of Doheny, clad only in his underwear and a silk bathrobe. There was a hole through his skull from ear to ear and he lay on his back. Blood was crisscrossed in a crazy pattern over his finely chiseled face.”

White set about his work.

The second corpse was that of Hugh Plunkett, Ned Doheny’s secretary. Spread-eagled on his stomach, Plunkett lay face down in a pool of blood that welled from a hole in his head. His brains had spattered the wall, and the rug at his feet had been shoved sideways as he fell. His right arm was stretched out, empty; the fingers of the left hand, lying at his side, had been burned by the half-smoked cigarette they still held.

White wondered about the cigarette, the first of a number of details he would find strange. He located the bullet that had passed through Ned Doheny’s brain. It was buried in an exterior wall at a height of six feet. Carefully, with tweezers and the blade of a penknife, he eased the bullet out of the flaking plaster and dropped it in an envelope. He fingerprinted both men, taking their lifeless hands in his own, rolling the finger and thumb ends on an ink pad, and pressing them against paper. He lifted Plunkett’s body and found a still-warm gun, a Bisley .45 Colt revolver. He wrapped it in a cloth, planning to take prints from it later.

With his camera and flashgun, White took crime scene photographs that have lost none of their power. They show an expensively furnished room with Ned Doheny lying in a pool of his own blood next to an overturned chair. Drying blood covers his face like a mask and his bare feet are tucked into shiny leather slippers. An unlit cigarette lies at his fingertips. A glass tumbler, unbroken, has fallen to the floor. An opened bottle of Johnnie Walker is on a table. Plunkett, dressed in a pinstripe suit, is in the background, prone in a doorway. He, too, lies in blood. The two men are close, as they had been for years, yet separated by a crucial distance.

Ned Doheny had a life of privilege from the start, very different from Plunkett’s. From the storybook frontier uncertainty of his own father’s, Ned grew up rich in Los Angeles, attending a private Catholic school, then Stanford University and USC law school. On graduation from USC in 1916 he joined Doheny Sr.’s oil business as a partner and became a multimillionaire instantly. Probate would value his personal estate at $12.5 million. In WWI he served as a lieutenant on a Navy cruiser and later behind a desk in Washington. In Los Angeles he was a member of the University Club, the Los Angeles Athletic Club, the Los Angeles Country Club. He had given handsome endowments to USC and sat as a university trustee; he was a part of the city’s aristocratic furniture—friendly, though spoiled and with flashes of his father’s temper.

Theodore Hugh Plunkett, on the other hand, was born poor on March 28, 1895, in Illinois, and came to Los Angeles in 1912. His parents, like many Midwesterners, had been seduced by the boosters’ promise of sunshine, health, and wealth. He got a job at a downtown service station owned by the family of Lucy Smith, soon to marry Ned Doheny. It was here that Plunkett and Ned Doheny first met. Plunkett changed the tires on one of Ned’s cars (Ned already had many) and the two struck up a friendship. Plunkett became a chauffeur for the Doheny family, and his WWI draft card shows that he enlisted in L.A. on the same day Ned did: June 16, 1917. Plunkett’s signature is clumsy, and the draft card states that he had blue eyes, light brown hair, and was of medium height and slender build. He served as a machinist’s mate on a submarine chaser, and, when the war was done, went back to work for his friend and boss. He was completely loyal to the Dohenys and they trusted him and treated him almost as a member of the family. He helped supervise the building of Greystone and wrote hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of checks in Ned’s name to pay the contractors. Plunkett was married, but he and Harriet, his wife of ten years, were estranged and without children. At the time of his death she was living in a retreat high in the Verdugo Hills, a neophyte dressed in Indian robes in one of Southern California’s many religious cults.

“Ned and Plunkett went everywhere together,” E. L. Doheny had said in one of the earlier trials.

“He acted as secretary to Ned, but their relationship was more than that of friends,” Frederic Kellogg, one of Ned’s attorneys, told the Times, a strangely formulated statement that hints at more than Kellogg probably intended. Leslie White would hear many rumors. One of them was that Plunkett and Ned Doheny had been lovers, killed by Ned’s wife, Lucy, out of jealousy.

Plunkett’s story belongs to another of those genres typical of L.A., which remains utterly class-ridden despite seeming so up for grabs. He was the employee who became an intimate, privileged yet doomed, part of the entourage. He’d been with Ned Doheny in the New York bank in November 1921, when the teller rubber-banded the notes into five $20,000 bundles; he’d traveled with Ned Doheny with the black leather satchel on the train to Washington; he’d fixed drinks for Ned Doheny and Albert Fall while the cash was handed over and the men laughed and talked at the Wardman Park Hotel. He’d played an important walk-on in Teapot Dome; and his role had been about to return to haunt the Dohenys.

Teapot Dome litigations had been dragging on for more than five years at this point. Doheny had lost the Elk Hills lease, and had been forced to make substantial reparation. Both he and Fall were acquitted of conspiring to defraud the government, but they were soon to be tried for bribery. The two cases would be heard separately—first Fall’s, then Doheny’s. Were Fall to be found innocent of taking a bribe, then ipso facto Doheny couldn’t have given one, and he’d be completely off the hook; but if Fall were found guilty, then Doheny would himself stand trial one more time. In Fall’s trial, much would hinge on Hugh Plunkett. For the first time Plunkett was being called upon to testify. The Dohenys had been trying to persuade him to check himself into Camarillo State Mental Hospital and dodge the subpoena.