Final Curtains
Edward Doheny’s troubles were actually far from over. Within two months of the homecoming festivities in Los Angeles—on February 8, 1927—the United States Supreme Court upheld the California court’s decision against him and ordered him to pay for all the oil he had extracted from Elk Hills. Initially a figure of $9,282,000 was placed on this, but later, through negotiation and compromise, the government’s claim against Doheny was reduced to $5,500,000. The Supreme Court also declared that Doheny had no right to the $11,000,000 that he claimed the government owed him for the storage tanks his company had built at Pearl Harbor. The entire proceedings, the court declared, had been thoroughly stained with “fraud and corruption” from the beginning. It was a scathing opinion, and it was unanimous. Still, for a man to whom $100,000 was no more than pocket money, Doheny was getting off lightly.
But now it was Albert Fall’s turn to stand trial, for accepting the bribe, and Doheny had an important stake in the outcome. If Fall were convicted of accepting the bribe, Doheny would have to stand trial again for offering it. As much to protect his own interests as Fall’s, Doheny had urged Fall to engage Frank Hogan to defend him and had even made Fall a gift of $5,000 to help defray his legal expenses. To provide further help, Doheny had also purchased Fall’s New Mexico ranch for $168,250, assuring Fall that he could continue to live there. And so, once again, the familiar cast of characters gathered at the Washington courthouse to play out yet another act in the long comic opera.
The curtain went up on a moment of high melodrama. Fall arrived at court looking terrible. He still wore his wide-brimmed western hat, but underneath it his face was gaunt and haggard. His color was bad and he looked much older than his sixty-seven years. A heavy overcoat and baggy trousers, looking as though they had been meant for someone else, hung on his emaciated frame, and he was in a wheelchair. A nurse and doctor were required to lift him, clutching a cane, from the wheelchair to a special leather easy chair that his doctor had ordered placed in the courtroom. The court proceedings had barely begun when Fall slid from the leather chair and collapsed in a heap on the floor. He was helped out of the courtroom by the nurse, the doctor, his wife and daughter, and Mr. and Mrs. Doheny. It was announced that he had suffered an “internal hemorrhage.”
The next day, while Hogan and his staff were trying to obtain a postponement of the trial because of Mr. Fall’s poor health, the doors to the courtroom suddenly swung open and Fall was wheeled in, looking even worse. With help he staggered once more to the leather chair, where a nurse covered his knees with a blue lap robe. He was insisting on going through with the trial because, as Hogan explained to the court, Fall wanted “vindication before he passes into the Great Beyond.” Implicit in the whole scene of course was the possibility that Hogan had staged the whole thing in order to get the jury’s sympathy for his sick, aging, and courageous client.
Hogan next tried to make emotional capital out of the murder of Ned Doheny. When Edward Doheny took the stand, Hogan interjected the son’s name at strategic points. Each time he did so the elder Doheny broke down and wept, and the court had to be adjourned until Mr. Doheny had sufficiently recovered himself to go on. In addition, it seemed to many observers that Hogan continued to make excessive use of Fall’s frail health in his remarks to the jury, a theatrical device reinforced by the fact that throughout his testimony Fall was solicitously hovered over by his wife, his daughter, the Dohenys, his doctor, and his nurse. Hogan also brought in, as character witnesses, a number of Fall’s friends and neighbors from New Mexico. (Significantly, no one in Washington could be persuaded to perform this service.)
When the time came for both the prosecuting and the defense attorneys to make their respective summations to the jury, the prosecuting attorney was admirably brief. He reminded the panel that the state of Mr. Fall’s health was immaterial to the question at hand. “It is all simple,” he said. “There are four things of a controlling nature to remember. One is that Doheny wanted the lease of the Elk Hills. The second is, Fall wanted money. The third is, Doheny got the lease, and the fourth is, Fall got the money.” As for the drainage of the oil lands, he said, “The only drainage in this case was from Doheny’s to Fall’s pocket.”
In his summation Mr. Hogan seemed not quite able to repeat his past histrionic performance for Doheny, though he tried, and he even had Mrs. Fall bring the Falls’ tiny granddaughter to court on that day. The child also seemed to be able to cry on cue. Hogan again tried to rely on pathos and the theme of patriotism. (“Patriotism,” the prosecution had told the jury, quoting Samuel Johnson, “is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”) Hogan spoke emotionally of Doheny and Fall as two old pioneering and prospecting pals, and chose one rather unfortunate simile when he said that national security ran “like a thread of gold” through the Elk Hills and Pearl Harbor deals. Finally the presiding judge, Mr. William Hitz, in charging the jury, said laconically: “Counsel has urged you to send this man back to the sunshine of New Mexico. Neither you nor I have anything to do with sunshine. You are here to decide this case on the evidence and nothing else.”
The jury was out for eleven hours without reaching a verdict, before retiring for the night. This extended interval was regarded as a heartening sign by the Falls, the Dohenys, and their lawyers. But when the jury came out at eleven the next morning, its verdict was: guilty. Weeping, sobbing, and shouting filled the courtroom. The Falls wept, the Dohenys wept, and then Edward Doheny swore at the judge, saying, among other things, “this damned court.” While the judge’s gavel pounded for order one of Fall’s many lawyers fell to the floor unconscious and was given a heart stimulant by Fall’s doctor. Frank Hogan lost his composure as thoroughly as he had lost his first criminal case. He banged his fists on the table and shouted incoherently at the judge. The judge sentenced Albert Fall to a year in prison and a fine of a hundred thousand dollars.
Now the thing that Doheny had dreaded most would have to take place. Though he had been cleared of the conspiracy charge, he would now have to stand trial again on the criminal charge of bribing a public official. His prospects did not look good. With Fall convicted for his part in the transaction, how could the briber hope to fare better than the bribed? Once again he chose Hogan to defend him, and as the curtain went up on the final act of the drama, the audience hurried back to its seats.
Hogan stepped to the footlights. In a sepulchral tone he read from previous testimony of Doheny’s dead son—“a voice from the tomb”—succeeding in imitating the young man’s voice. Hearing him, the blind Mrs. Doheny cried out, “It’s Ned!… It’s Ned!” and collapsed in hysterical tears. Mr. Doheny wept along with her. The testimony contained almost nothing new and reiterated everything that had been said before, but Doheny did add one new wrinkle to his explanation of the hundred-thousand-dollar loan to Fall. Once, Doheny said, in the year 1886, he had fallen down a mine shaft and broken both legs. His old friend Fall had lent him some lawbooks so that he could study law while recuperating. For this favor, some thirty-five years later, he had helped Fall out with a hundred thousand dollars.
The trial lasted barely ten days, and Frank Hogan again provoked widespread weeping with his melodramatic summation to the jury. The jury was out for barely an hour before returning with a verdict of not guilty.
When the news reached Los Angeles, the town went wild. The favorite son had put the city on the map, and without disgrace. A reception committee even larger than the first turned out to meet the returning Dohenys when they stepped off their train. In the crowd were city officials, clergymen, commissioned officers from the army and navy, and a delegation of reigning motion picture stars. Not since Sarah Bernhardt’s sweep through San Francisco had there been so spectacular a media event.
Edward Doheny’s battle with the United States government had cost him quite a lot of money, perhaps $20,000,000 all told—which was a bit more than change. But he still had plenty more, at least $100,000,000. And he had not had to go to jail. His East Coast rival, Harry F. Sinclair, who refused to answer a question put to him by the Senate committee in 1927, had been declared in contempt and, partly on that account and partly on another, had been sentenced to jail and had served a term of six and a half months. On July 18, 1931, Albert Fall, after more than a year of unsuccessful legal maneuvering, went by police ambulance to the federal penitentiary at Santa Fe, where he became the first Cabinet member in American history to serve a prison sentence. Four months later, in November, he became eligible for parole, which, however, was denied him on the ground that it did not apply to the perpetrator of “so grave an offense against the government and civilization.” Altogether Fall served more than nine months. But Doheny was free as air. The moral was clear: Californians were luckier than other mortals.
Though he had appeared to be at death’s door at the time of his trial, Albert Fall survived for twelve more years after his release from prison, and died in March 1943 at the advanced age of eighty-three. Edward L. Doheny had died nine years earlier, on September 8, 1935, at age of seventy-nine, having been almost completely bedridden at Chester Place for three years. The last years of his life had been plagued by a welter of stockholders’ suits as a result of his Elk Hills and Pearl Harbor activities, and in all he had been required to pay $47,137,696.28 in settlements, taxes, interest, and penalties as a result of his involvement with Mr. Fall. But there was still plenty more. At his shrewd wife’s suggestion he had, prior to his death, divided up his fortune between herself and other relatives, giving his family $75,000,000 in trusts and keeping $10,000,000 for himself.
Shortly after Doheny’s death his estate, which owned the ranch in New Mexico, served an eviction notice on Albert Fall, a gesture that Fall and his family deemed unkind. But, then, Fall was no longer of use to the Doheny family, nor was he, in fact, to anyone else.
The Countess Estelle Doheny survived her husband for a number of years, living luxuriously in the vast reaches of her Los Angeles estate, surrounded by servants, guards, watchdogs, and occasional movie stars. Finally, taken ill, she was rushed to a Los Angeles hospital, where doctors advised the family she had only hours to live. A priest was summoned to administer the last rites and told to make all possible haste in getting to the hospital. He arrived within minutes and, informed that death was perhaps only moments away, ran down the corridor, swooped through the countess’s doorway, skidded across a few feet of highly polished floor, and landed, elbows first, on the patient’s stomach. With that, Mrs. Doheny expired.
The United States Navy, meanwhile, had got its oil lands back. Periodically they were checked for leaks, which always proved to be minimal. As for the tremendous oil holdings of the heirs of Edward Doheny, they passed out of the family’s hands in 1949. The purchaser had to borrow forty million dollars and issue 600,000 shares of stock to acquire them, because what was involved was in those days a great deal of oil—a production of 4,500,000 barrels a year, plus reserves of more than 48,000,000 barrels. The purchaser, ironically, was none other than the Union Oil Company of California, the company Edward L. Doheny had tried to buy out thirty-four years earlier.