THIRTEEN
Short of Domestic Bliss
HOWARD AND DOTTIE'S MARRIAGE had never followed a standard script. Childless for seventeen years, the relationship was framed by social activities and trips around the globe. By the late 1940s, alcohol was affecting the health of their marriage. Dottie joined Alcoholics Anonymous and, coincident with her relative sobriety, surprised everyone when in 1949 she announced that she was pregnant.
The birth of a son changed everything for Howard. He now had an heir to what he called his “empire.” Like his own father, he doted on his son. And Howard junior also turned out to be a precocious learner. Nicknamed “Steady” (a shortening of his grandmother's maiden name, Fieldstad), he was reading by age three.1 Before the age of eight, he was quoted in a newspaper article explaining how a thermonuclear reaction took place.
Not surprisingly, given how late they had come to parenting and the fact that the boy was likely to be their only child, Howard and Dottie were extremely protective. The memory of the notorious kidnapping of aviator Charles Lindbergh's infant son in 1932 contributed to their concerns. Steady was not encouraged to run free in the neighborhood and play with other children. He never learned to ride a bike as a child.
In public, Howard senior liked to cultivate an image as the devoted and adoring father. He told Fortune in 1958 that he and his son were heavily involved in Cub Scouts. “This month it was jujitsu. Next month it's kites. I'm the oldest and lousiest father in the Pack.” He and Dottie commiserated: “Dottie swears she'll be the only P.T.A. mother in school in a wheelchair.”2 In private, when he did have time to work on Scout projects with his son, the interaction was often one-sided. “One time I had to build a bird house,” Howard junior remembers. “By the time he finished showing me how to do it, there was nothing left for me to do.”3 Sometimes the family went to a ranch they owned near San Bernardino. Howard and Steady would ride together, with Howard on a horse and Steady on a pony.4 More often, Howard left parenting to Dottie; his trusted secretary, Evelyn Barty; or other members of his household staff.
The family spent many weekends on Harbor Island, eating and drinking at the Newport Yacht Club and sailing together. After Howard's heart attack in 1956, Dottie was usually the skipper when they raced. She took classes in piloting, seamanship, and advanced navigation.5 Howard liked to brag that she had “probably sailed more tough races than any other woman” except Peggy Slatter, a famous yachtswoman of the era.6
Howard's nephews were frequent visitors to Harbor Island and the house on June Street in Hancock Park. In 1958, the Los Angeles Times published a photo of the extended family arranged around a French coffee table. Bill Ahmanson and his first wife, Patty, were arrayed with their five daughters: Mary Jane, Patty, Amy, Dorothy, and Joanne. Bob Ahmanson stood behind his wife, Kathy, who wrapped one arm around their little girl, Karen. Perched on a couch with his hands on his knees, eight-year-old Steady looked eagerly off camera while his proud parents, Howard and Dottie, stood beside the mantel on the hearth, Dottie with her arms crossed and her expression almost annoyed, and Howard, in a light suit with a white handkerchief in his breast pocket, smiling like the amused patriarch that he was.7
Among this group of girls and adults, Steady buried himself in reading books and volumes from the encyclopedia. With a crew cut and thick glasses at the age of eight, he was by turns excited and withdrawn. By his own admission, he was generally not introspective or self-conscious. Within the family, he later gravitated to his Aunt Kathy because he enjoyed her wit and she was emotionally “cool” in a family that tended toward what Steady perceived as sentimental and “gooshy” emotions, especially after the alcohol started to flow.8
After the heart attack, Howard worked from home. The swimming and yachting, combined with his natural ruddy complexion, left him looking “forever sunburned,” yet not necessarily athletic.9 With all his exercising he was down to 162 pounds, he wrote to Hayden. His tailor took in two inches at the waist of his suit pants. The jumpsuits he liked to wear when he was relaxing in Newport Beach or on the boat ballooned a little around him. But the new regimen had done nothing for his mental attitude. “I still have my same repulsive disposition,” he joked.10 In fact, his personality was so strong that, as Dottie put it, he could “change the spirit and conversational trend of a whole roomful of people merely by his mood.” Sometimes that meant things became dour or serious. More often, he could turn a room of people “sitting around with their teeth in their mouth” into a party.11
Despite his desire to focus his business on Southern California, Ahmanson's interest in the wider world did not diminish. He and Dottie continued to travel. In April 1957, they invited Bill and Bob and their wives, along with the ever-present Evelyn Barty, to cruise the South Seas on the S.S. Monterey. Two years later, Howard planned a similar trip to Japan. In his usual glib and ironic style, he wrote a letter to a friend in Japan to make the arrangements. “I suppose we should see a Temple—good God, imagine cominghome without one picture of a Temple, but I would prefer that it be close to the road and, as far as I am concerned, after you have seen one temple you have seen all of them. My compatriots are all of the same mood, believe me.”12 This trip had to be postponed, however, when Howard was hospitalized in May 1959 with an ulcer.13
By this time in his life, Ahmanson was pestered with health issues. In addition to his heart problems, he suffered from gout and lived on a fairly restricted, mostly vegetarian diet.14 Under doctor's orders, he ate custards and pureed food.15 He rarely slept well and often read or played the piano or organ late at night.16 He drank heavily, though only the people closest to him could tell when he was really drunk. Even after he had been drinking, he had an uncanny ability to recall conversations and facts.17 His doctors tried to get him to stop smoking and limit his drinking, but his lifestyle took a toll on his body.
When they returned from the Asia trip, the Ahmansons moved into a new home on South Hudson in Hancock Park, L.A.’s sanctuary for the very rich. The Tudor-style mansion had been built for Frederik S. Albertson, an automobile company executive, on the eve of the Great Depression in 1929. Designed by Alexander D. Chisholm, it was baronial in mass and tone.18 From the flagstone walk, a carved door opened to admit guests to a spacious foyer with a thirty-foot domed ceiling. Golden oak-paneled walls set off paintings of the old masters. In the library, walnut paneling deepened the shadows in the room. The master bedroom featured seascapes by Millard Sheets hung on walls covered with a deep green Chinese silk. The window expanses were draped in gold and sand brocade.19 Reflecting Ahmanson's eclecticism and deep-seated opposition to authority (unless he was in charge), a “Beatnik Alley” with chalk-white walls was splashed with what a society columnist called “vivid colors of the moderns.” In the music room, Howard stashed and played his instruments, including his organ, accordion, banjo, vibraharp, ukulele, and clavietta.20 Across the floors, the nails of Dottie's French poodles clicked as they followed her through the house, paying scant attention to her four cats.21
Despite the grandeur of the house, it was not especially ostentatious. It avoided nostalgia for the Spanish colonial era in California. It reflected the courtly life that Ahmanson imagined for himself, but it was a life that he wanted to live privately, not publicly. And it was the private life that was increasingly troubled. Alcohol and Dottie's “gremlins” fed a fundamental instability in the marriage, which Howard often tried to escape by sailing.
ESCAPE TO THE OCEAN
Ahmanson's attention to detail and strategy was especially obvious before a race. In 1961, for example, he badly wanted to win the Transpacific Yacht Race (the Transpac) from Los Angeles to Honolulu, so he bought a new boat. Built in the late 1920s, the eighty-one-foot sloop was named the Barlovento. It had won the Transpac before, finishing “first-in-fleet” in 1957, and had made the journey several times.22 Howard rechristened it the Sirius II. When he bought it, the boat had a broken mast. After it was repaired, he had the mast and spinnaker pole x-rayed to identify any hairline fracture that might lead to another break.23
The race crew of fourteen included some of Ahmanson's closest associates: his nephews Robert and Bill Ahmanson, architect William Pereira, attorney Thomas Webster, and USC president Norman Topping. But there were also a couple of champion sailors: Fred Schenck, the 1957 national Snipe (a type of racing dinghy) sailing champion, as well as Bill Ficker.24 Ahmanson offered his crew a one-page letter outlining his expectations. From the start, he insisted, all strategy would be delegated to the watch captain or his assistant. Yet he invited everyone to offer their best judgment and advice at all times. “There is almost no one aboard that is not fully competent to skipper a ship to Honolulu,” he wrote, “so speak up. We would be fools to not beg for your suggestions about anything at any time. There is nothing that cannot be improved, and I've never seen such even-tempered sailing geniuses as you gents when it comes to taking suggestions from the other guy.”25
On the day before the race, a reporter asked Ahmanson about his chances. “I'm always a pessimist,” he confessed, “but the crew is always optimistic.”26 The crew's optimism seemed to be well placed the next day. Sirius II was extremely good off the start and was the first to reach the west end of Catalina. With the wind abeam, the crew covered a record distance on the first day.27 That night the wind blew very hard, with water pouring over the deck.
There were all sorts of problems with provisions. Pereira was in charge of the menus. He had labeled cans and bags of food for each meal. But the first night, when Ficker went below deck, he discovered water everywhere. To lighten the boat, Howard had had the engine removed, but the underwater exhaust pipes had not been plugged. The whole crew worked the bilge pumps to empty the water. Then they discovered that the labels had been washed off all the food. “Everything was confused and the menu book was lost,” remembers Ficker.
Howard's chauffeur, who was supposed to do the cooking, got sick and was incapacitated for the entire voyage. Topping, the president of USC, volunteered. Opening unlabeled cans and making the best of what he discovered, he prepared the meals and kept his assigned watch.28 On board, by the skipper's rules, there was no drinking—except for beer and a Martini Night midway through the race.
After four days at sea, the crew discovered an imminent disaster. A crack had appeared in the bowsprit. If it grew worse, the boat would lose its jib. The crew immediately hove to and patched the crack as best they could. One of the professional sailors onboard, Roy Norr, said he was praying the high-masted boat wouldn't come apart in the race. “We were driving her hard to make her go as fast as possible.” At some points, the boat ripped through the ocean at fourteen knots.29
Despite this speed, Sirius II swapped the lead back and forth with the Ticonderoga, a seventy-two-foot ketch owned and skippered by a Michigan native who had won twenty-two major events in the Atlantic. On the second-to-last day, the crew trailed the Ticonderoga by twenty-five miles on “dead reckoning” positions. But on the final day, over 226 miles, the Sirius II surged ahead. As they approached Hawaii after a 2,225-mile race from San Pedro, Ahmanson and his crew battled the Ticonderoga for position in the Molokai Channel. Spinnakers on both boats ballooned as the sun dropped below Diamond Head peak. Then suddenly, as they neared Koko Head, the spinnaker pole on Sirius II snapped. Thinking quickly, the crew cut the halyard, but they couldn't slice through the lines. With the sail dragging in the water behind her, the boat still made ten knots. As darkness gathered, the boat, thirty-seven minutes ahead of its rival, cut through the searchlight beaming across the water to mark the finish line with the crew assembled on the fantail. A flotilla of small boats packed with spectators swarmed around the ship with air horns blasting. At the time, it was the closest finish in the twenty-two-year history of the race.30 Dottie sent Howard congratulations but she was not there when he celebrated.
LOSING BROTHER AND WIFE
Months earlier, in March 1960, Howard had returned to Los Angeles from a different sailing adventure to learn that his brother was gravely ill. Hayden died soon afterward of a cerebral hemorrhage.31 At the funeral, Howard stood with Aimee, Bill, and Bob as his brother was buried in Omaha. It's unclear whether Dottie went with him, but six weeks later the couple separated.32 Dottie remained in the house on Harbor Island. Howard stayed in the home in Hancock Park. With his usual wit, Howard explained to a reporter that of the couple's two dogs he had gotten “the one that bites.”
Steady shuttled back and forth between houses and parents. Howard and Dottie wrote careful, even thoughtful notes to each other as they negotiated his schedule. Dottie explained to her son that Howard had not kept his wedding vows, but she did not elaborate.33 She filed for divorce on May 6.34
Howard vacillated between trying to save the marriage and enjoying his new freedom to socialize without worrying about Dottie's drinking or reaction. At the same time, he continued to seek the fond and doting relationship with his son that his father had had with him. In August, he took the ten-year-old Steady on a tour of western national parks, including Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon.35
Throughout their separation, Howard and Dottie rehashed many of the deep tensions in their relationship. They tried counseling. Howard sometimes came to dinner at the house on Harbor Island. Sometimes they went out together. Dinner at La Scala. Dancing at the Grove. They went to parties with mutual friends. They attended community events, including a dinner at LACMA in April. Drinking led to fights in the car on the way home. Howard criticized Dottie's friends. They argued over whether Steady should attend public or private school. At times, Dottie wrote that Howard was “mad and bitchy.”36
As the divorce trial loomed, Howard tried to convince Dottie to postpone. Alone, they talked over the terms of their settlement. Dottie did not keep a journal, but she sometimes jotted personal notes in her calendar. She wrote that Howard had agreed to a 50-50 split on everything.37 But then they fought again. In letters to Dottie, Howard continued to call her “darling” and referred to himself as “yer ole man.”38
Dottie and Howard worried that the divorce would cause Steady to retreat even further into himself. Howard insisted that Steady's problems all stemmed from the fact that he was brilliant.39 As his father had done with him, Howard tried to include Steady in business meetings at the house, but the boy crawled under the table and showed little interest in the intricacies of mortgage lending and insurance. When Dottie wanted to send Steady to a psychiatrist, Howard resisted. Somewhat like his son, he tended to avoid introspection about his own emotions and hesitated to put his only son in a position where he would be expected to reveal himself. Eventually, however, he agreed.40
One night, when Dottie and Steady were eating dinner in the Harbor Island house, the eleven-year-old asked his mother how much the psychiatrist cost. When Dottie told him, he said he thought that “$30 an hour was pretty high to feed me cookies.” Knowing that his father had gone to a psychiatrist, he asked his mother if she was going to one too. She had gone to one, and Howard had tried to get her to go back. Dottie asked her son if Howard still thought she was “nuts.” Ever blunt, Steady replied, “Yes.”41
Three weeks later, on the afternoon of October 23, Howard and Dottie appeared in court for the pretrial proceedings in their divorce.42 Despite the looming finality of their break, Steady seemed to be doing fine in school. One Friday night when the boy was at Howard's home in Hancock Park, Dottie answered the phone. Steady reported that he was watching TV. His father had gone out and left him with the household staff.43 Sunday morning, Dottie opened the Los Angeles Times to see a picture of Howard with the city's paragon of beauty and charm—Caroline Leonetti.44
CAROLINE LEONETTI
A charm, fashion, and beauty expert, Caroline Leonetti was a well-known television and radio personality in 1961. Twelve years younger than Ahmanson, she had been born in San Francisco in 1918 to first-generation Italian immigrants.45 Her father was a wholesale tailor who worked for some of the city's leading haberdashers. Her mother was a seamstress who designed and made children's clothing. As a young teenager, she was anything but a modeling queen. At five foot five inches tall, she weighed 165 pounds. She read voraciously and avoided the social scene in junior high. Her mother got her interested in dancing, exercising, acting, and home economics. Driven by an inner discipline to transform herself, Leonetti lost weight. She was elected student body vice president in high school and was class valedictorian. A scholarship to the California School of Design helped to cultivate her eye for fashion and style. She took ballet to learn how to carry herself and move gracefully. She studied gymnastics to help build muscle.46
The 1939 World's Fair on Treasure Island in San Francisco opened a path to Leonetti's entrepreneurial future. As the winner of the city's Goddess of Beauty contest, Leonetti traveled the country inviting people to the fair. The experience further enhanced her self-confidence, brought modeling opportunities, and led to her decision to open her own school and modeling agency—the House of Charm—in San Francisco. Distilling the lessons she had learned, she taught her students to analyze and accept themselves, to make the most of their physical, mental, and spiritual qualities, and then to live gracefully.47
Leonetti's success attracted the attention of San Francisco radio host Art Linkletter. Every Wednesday she joined him in the studio for a segment called “What's Doing Ladies?” during which she provided tips on fashion and style to women in Linkletter's audience. With the advent of television after the war, Linkletter moved to Los Angeles, where his program was renamed House Party and was simulcast on both radio and TV. Leonetti stayed with the program, moving her House of Charm to Los Angeles.
Personally, the timing was good. An early marriage had ended in divorce, but not before the birth of her daughter, Margo. In Los Angeles as a single parent, Leonetti added a talent agency to her list of entrepreneurial initiatives. It was the first to be franchised by the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA). Her clients and students included Virginia Mayo, Mitzi Gaynor, Vicki Carr, Kim Novak, Angie Dickinson, and Jane Russell. Like Howard, Caroline was driven to succeed and worked sixteen hours a day.
Even before the end of the war, Leonetti had established a reputation as a fashion consultant and authority on “self-improvement for women.” She spoke to women's groups. On Friday nights, she presided over fashion show dinners at Henri's on Sunset Boulevard.48 She judged beauty contests. A leader in the mostly male Hollywood Advertising Club, she organized a fashion show in 1947 with gossip columnist Hedda Hopper as the featured speaker.49 She was in the newspapers constantly from 1947 on. To combat juvenile delinquency, she founded the Los Angeles Charm Clinic for Underprivileged Girls, which, according to one newspaper report, spread to 135 cities in the United States and Canada.50 As early as 1950, she became a regular on the local CBS affiliate offering hints on charm.51 That year, she published a book, 24 Steps to Loveliness, which launched yet another career as a syndicated newspaper columnist.52
Caroline was introduced to Howard by Art and Lois Linkletter at a wedding for a mutual friend. They sat together at dinner. Caroline had a broken arm and had covered the cast with gardenias. This elegant touch didn't solve the practical problem of cutting the meat they were served for dinner, so she asked for Howard's help. As the great financier, he expected to be held in awe and was dismayed that she knew nothing about the savings and loan business or his reputation.
Smitten, Howard invited Caroline out on a number of occasions. Caroline, however, had spent a lifetime fending off the advances of rich and powerful men. She was not about to rush into a serious relationship with a man who was technically still married to someone else. In the meantime, Howard adjusted to his life as a bachelor and to the camaraderie of his friends, including two university presidents.
UNIVERSITY PRESIDENTS
In March 1960, Howard had received a letter from his friend Henry A. Bubb, the president of Capital Federal Savings and Loan in Topeka, Kansas. According to Bubb, neither the worst snowstorm in sixty years nor its associated floods could compare with the disaster of losing the University of Kansas's chancellor, Franklin D. Murphy, to UCLA. As a member of the Kansas Board of Regents, Bubb had seen Murphy in action. “He is one of the most brilliant and most personable men I have ever known.” Bubb credited Murphy with transforming the University of Kansas “into one of the top universities in the United States.” “California's gain is Kansas’ loss,” Bubb wrote, “and it's a big loss.”53 Bubb hoped that Howard would “make a point to get acquainted” with Murphy and his wife, Judy, once they arrived in the Golden State.
Murphy was a brilliant, ambitious, and visionary man with “a gift for psychological insight into the intricacies of power and personality,” according to his biographer, Margaret Leslie Davis.54 Like Ahmanson, he had been born and raised in the Midwest, one of two sons of a prosperous father who died just as he was coming into adulthood. Like Ahmanson, Murphy had followed his father's career path, although into medicine rather than insurance, graduating first in his class at the University of Pennsylvania. Following a brilliant career as a doctor during the war, Murphy turned down an offer to join the medical faculty at Penn. Instead, he went to the University of Kansas to help build the institution that his father had started. He became dean of the medical school and in 1951, at the age of thirty-five, was appointed chancellor of the entire university. Enormously successful in this role, Murphy ran headlong into political conflicts when Kansas elected a mercurial populist as governor who was determined to demonize the “elitism” of the university system. In July 1960, Murphy left Kansas to become the chancellor of UCLA.55 He told the guests assembled to witness his investiture that fall that he intended to transform what some considered a commuter college into a world-class university.56
As chancellor, Murphy understood that UCLA's future depended on the broader cultural and economic development of Los Angeles. He sensed that the city and the region were on the cusp of a cultural renaissance as millions of new residents sought to define their individual and collective relationships to place and as a new elite, enriched by the city's postwar growth, began to exercise its influence on the community's institutions. With remarkable acumen and alacrity, Murphy began to see himself as the culture broker who would manage big egos and guide the institution building that would make this vision possible.
Murphy met Howard Ahmanson, and they began to work together after Ed Carter asked both of them to serve on the newly reconstituted board of LACMA, with Murphy in charge of the building fund campaign. They soon became close friends and collaborators. The two men drank Scotch, chain-smoked, and talked about money, women, art, and the future of Los Angeles. According to Margaret Leslie Davis, “Murphy gave free rein to his bawdy Irish wit in competition with Ahmanson's droll observations.”57 At times, Ahmanson thought Murphy tended to be high-strung and Napoleonic.58 But as Davis points out, they had much in common. “In their camaraderie they acknowledged a truth about themselves: they were not part and parcel of the ultrachic, sophisticated circle in which they functioned so well.” They were midwesterners, deeply connected to what “Murphy insisted was the actual, beating heart of America.”59
Howard also remained close to his own alma mater. When the university's board named Norman Topping president in 1958, Howard had his chauffeur drive him from Harbor Island to a reception for the new leader. When Howard was introduced to him, Topping was holding a martini glass. Howard was delighted to discover that he was not a teetotaler like the former president. Topping was also a transplant from the middle of the country and a medical doctor. Born and raised in Missouri, he had moved to Los Angeles with his parents at the age of fourteen and graduated from Los Angeles High School.60 After Topping moved into a house a block away from Ahmanson, the two men saw more of each other. Topping became a member of Howard's racing crew because he could do double duty as Howard's personal physician.61
While Ahmanson recruited Topping to sail with him, Topping invited Howard to help him shape the future of his alma mater. In late 1960, Ahmanson joined USC's board.62 He made several major gifts, including one million dollars in 1962 to help fund the development of a biosciences research center.63 When the facility was complete, Howard brought Steady with him for a tour that included quarters for lab rats, mice, and monkeys. Steady dubbed the place “rat heaven.”64
Howard's relationships with Murphy and Topping in the early 1960s were critical to the continued development of his vision for Los Angeles and his understanding of his potential role as a businessman and a philanthropist. As presidents of the region's two major universities, these men were keenly aware of how money, culture, and intellectual pursuits might shape the future of the region. With Millard Sheets, Ahmanson had married the essential localism of the savings and loan concept to collective images of community identity. In conversations with Murphy and Topping, however, Howard's cultural, commercial, and political vision was changing in 1963. Home Savings and Loan was more than a collection of neighborhood thrifts; it was a financial powerhouse in a city ready to take its place among the great cities of the world. From Ahmanson's point of view, the work of building that city was shared by private enterprise and public capital as a natural extension of the managed economy. Increasingly, however, the easy and comfortable relationship between government and private enterprise seemed to be coming apart as one era came to an end and another one began.