Tough Lady
One reason why it was hard to take Joan Irvine as seriously as she obviously wished to be taken was that she was, after all, “only a woman.” In the traditionally all-male world of big-time ranching a woman’s function was supposed to be decorative and domestic. In fact, this was a rule that applied pretty much to the state of California, where the mentality of the mining camp died hard. (In the mining camp the miner was hardworking, hard-drinking, the boss; his women were simply whores.) In California, even in the 1950s, there were only a limited number of things considered acceptable for a moneyed woman to do. She could shop at I. Magnin. She could join her moneyed women friends for Monday lunch (the fashionable day) at the old Mural Room of the St. Francis Hotel. She could plan menus with her Chinese cook and pen invitations to little dinner parties and thank-you notes to her hostesses. Some volunteer work was expected of her, either for the Junior League or for something high-minded like art or something unquestionably worthy, such as the children’s hospital. Beyond that was man’s stuff. A woman was not expected to handle money or manage a checkbook, and all of her bills were placed, unopened, on her husband’s desk. She was supposed to stay out of politics and certainly out of business. Otherwise she found herself in deep trouble in the California he-man’s world. Which was exactly where Joan Irvine found herself in 1957—a big, beautiful blonde who couldn’t possibly have a brain in her head, meddling in the affairs of men.
In fact, other than as a sportswoman and passable amateur painter, Joan had not displayed any particular talent. At the Westridge School, a private preparatory school for girls in Pasadena, she had been only an average student, who had a fondness for low-cut dresses and, according to her yearbook, “liquid luaus.” Her exposure to higher education was brief—two dilatory stints at Marymount College, in Los Angeles, and the University of California at Berkeley. And yet, when Westridge was raising funds among alumnae for a new library, Joan responded by writing out a check for twenty-five thousand dollars. Since hers was the largest single contribution, the school christened its new building the Joan Irvine Library.
She had also made several quick passes at being married. At age nineteen she had married a man named Charles Swinden, who was a lifeguard at Laguna Beach. There was a son, James, but the marriage lasted only two years. Next she married Russell S. Penniman III, who was described as “a dashing Navy flier.” Again there was a son, Russell IV, but again the marriage lasted just two years. Her third marriage was to Richard Burt, a contractor, and this lasted another two years but produced no children. Finally she married a Virginia horseman and gentleman farmer named Morton Smith, by whom she had a third son, Morton. Perhaps because Smith was nineteen years older than she and the first of her four husbands to be wealthy in his own right, this marriage seemed to take, and to provide her emotional life with some stability, at least for a while. But her marital record did little to mitigate the impression that Joan Irvine was nothing but a typical spoiled, bored, rich girl who had no idea of what she wanted.
On the other hand, though there was much of her grandfather in Joan, there was also much of her mother. Athalie Irvine was a similarly independent sort who didn’t mind bending the sexist regulations of California society. Mrs. Irvine was eventually remarried, to Judge Thurmond Clarke, a relative of South Carolina’s Senator Strom Thurmond. The new Mrs. Clarke had flung herself enthusiastically into Republican politics in Orange County, a very Republican place. She had also taken a job, as publisher of a Spanish-language movie magazine that her husband owned.
When old J.I. died his company owned the ranch in Orange County, which consisted of about 82,000 acres (reduced from its original size by several forced sales, including two branches of the interstate highway system which traversed it), plus 90,000 acres in Montana, and a smallish—7000 acres—parcel in the Imperial Valley. Fifty-four percent of the stock in this demesne had already been deeded to the Irvine Foundation. In her grandfather’s will Joan was left 22 percent of the stock. Smaller bequests went to his widow, his then one remaining son, and other grandchildren. Thus it was that though the foundation controlled the majority of the voting stock, Joan became the largest individual stockholder in the Irvine Company.
Which brings us to the summer of 1957, when twenty-four-year-old Joan, whose mother had acted as custodian of her stock up to that point, was given her stock and attended her first meeting of the company’s all-male board of directors. She looked very pretty, her blond California hair in a casual California flip style. The gentlemen greeted her warmly, and of course a bit patronizingly, particularly her grandfather’s old friend Loyall McLaren, whom, as a child, she had called “Uncle Loyall.”
The meeting had been expected to be no more than a routine affair. But to everyone’s surprise—and no small amount of displeasure—Joan started off the proceedings by asking a number of tough questions. These involved certain land dealings in the company’s Imperial Valley properties. Brad Hellis, it seemed, had cut himself into partnership with some of these company investments and had also, Joan claimed, taken advantage of his corporate position to buy lands on his own account or in partnership with the company’s real-estate man, Walter Tubach. She demanded that the board terminate these partnership arrangements. The stunned board of directors voted to postpone action on her motion until its next meeting, four months later.
For this meeting Joan arrived—fresh from having her second baby and fresh from a separation from her second husband—armed with lengthy documentation of nine complicated real-estate transactions between Hellis and the company, Tubach and the company, and Hellis and Tubach. In one of these, she alleged, Hellis would in effect be given the two-hundred-thousand-dollar loan that her grandfather had denied him before his death. She moved that the company remove Hellis and have no further dealings with Tubach. The first of many angry exchanges occurred between her and McLaren, who called her a “damned troublemaker.” She responded by calling him “senile.”
It was clear that Joan Irvine was out to depose the palace guard, headed by Hellis, which had run the company since her grandfather’s death ten years earlier. It was also clear that she was out to settle old scores; she had never been convinced that her grandfather’s death had been either natural or accidental. And it was finally clear that the debutante had turned into a Dragon Lady. When no one would second her motion Joan departed from the meeting in fury. As Loyall McLaren bewailed, “The camel has gotten into the tent!”
It was worse than that. At a special meeting of the board that was called a few weeks later Joan announced that she and her mother had engaged counsel and had taken legal action to prepare a stockholders’ suit against the Irvine Company, Hellis and Tubach. She said that the Los Angeles Superior Court would soon subpoena the two men for pretrial testimony, along with several other directors, including Myford Irvine. A few days later Brad Hellis resigned from the company. In return Joan agreed to drop her lawsuit, saying also she didn’t want the proceedings to uncover anything that might be damaging to her Uncle Myford, which suggested that a three-way conspiracy might be involved. Naturally she considered Hellis’ resignation a personal victory and a tacit admission on his part of wrongdoing. Hellis, insisting that he had been guilty of no improprieties, also cited Myford as his reason for resigning, saying that he “decided he didn’t want to fight. So I resigned.”
This resignation, of course, seemed to lead to Myford’s sudden decline and, two years later, to his extraordinary death.
Myford Irvine’s “suicide” made a bad corporate situation much worse, for now the company’s reputation was tinged with scandal. On the day of his funeral a hasty meeting of the board was called at the mansion. The immediate problem was succession now that the last adult male Irvine was gone. (In fact, the only remaining male Irvine was Myford’s six-year-old son, James.) Joan vigorously proposed that a three-man executive committee be set up, with herself a member, but this notion was voted down by the board. Instead, while Joan accused them of old-fogyism, the board proceeded to elect its oldest member, seventy-seven-year-old Arthur McFadden, as president of the company, and another old-timer, Loyall McLaren, as vice president. McLaren was also elected president of the foundation.
The next item of business concerned the way the company was to make the inevitable transition from farming to urban development. It had to come, Joan argued, and she accused the board of dragging its feet. She produced population-growth studies showing that the company’s Orange County land was the next logical extension of the urban growth of Los Angeles, and yet at the ranch very little had been done to prepare for this lucrative tide of building. The board replied that real estate development required careful study and should be approached with great caution and the advice of experts. Harvesting Valencia oranges was one thing, but building cities was quite another. There were also tax problems. Since most of the company’s business was still agricultural, whatever sales of land had occurred had been taxed at the farm rate of 25 percent, rather than the higher corporate rate applied to housing and business.
Joan asked that a top-flight architect or city planner be engaged to provide an over-all plan for the development of the land. She had other complaints. It struck her as absurd that on the company’s balance sheet the property of the Irvine ranch still carried a value of less than a dollar an acre—the appraised value in 1894, when the company was incorporated—when the land was clearly worth much more than that. She claimed that the company’s stock was greatly undervalued. (Later an Internal Revenue Service appraisal would prove her quite right.) But most of all she objected to the fact that, though the company had annual profits after taxes of $5,500,000, out of a total income of $28,600,000, only $2,400,000 was paid out to shareholders in dividends by an organization that was worth at least $200,000,000. This meant that Joan’s stock in the company paid her only $496,000 a year, or just slightly more than 1 percent of the value of her holdings. Most other stocks, of course, pay at least 6 percent.
The board, which had begun referring to Joan as “the princess pretender” (while she referred to them as “McLaren and Company,” and “the Foundation bozos”), countered by saying that Joan’s real problem was that she was greedy.
It is always hard to feel sorry for a girl who has a yacht, and an attractive young woman with an income of half a million dollars a year has a hard time presenting herself as a figure for pity. But with Joan Irvine it was not easy to make the greedy label stick. She was, after all, merely asking for a return on her money commensurate with its earning power if invested elsewhere. At the most conservative estimate, her Irvine stock was worth more than forty million dollars, and in fact she had been offered a hundred million for it and had refused to sell. She pointed out that the Irvine Foundation, with its majority interest in the company, was also being grievously shortchanged. With a higher yield the foundation would have greatly increased funds to expend on its charitable operations. She charged that the foundation had become merely a device by which huge sums of corporate money were being hoarded tax-free, since foundations pay no taxes. But more than just money was involved. There was also a spiritual side to her crusade and her girlhood dream on horseback of great cities rising out of the empty land. She had good reason to believe that she was her grandfather’s favorite heir, and she believed that she was his spiritual heir as well, with a mission to carry his creation into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, to deliver his land to what she saw—and felt he would approve of—as its manifest destiny. As his surrogate she was merely trying to express his will.
And in the process she was proving herself to be just as stubborn and strong-willed—and, yes, as difficult to get along with—as old J.I. The University of California had been casting about for possible sites for a new campus south of Los Angeles, and a search committee had settled on a one-thousand-acre stretch of the Irvine ranch. Some twenty other communities and property owners meanwhile had offered to donate land to the university, and Joan strongly urged the company’s board to do the same. Her motives were not entirely altruistic. She had watched the University of California at Los Angeles being built and had noticed the building boom in the immediate vicinity that accompanied it. She had seen how the Janss family, among others, who had developed the Village of Westwood hard by the U.C.L.A. campus, had become very rich. But the board of directors, who now routinely voted against anything Joan proposed, said no. They would sell the land to the university, but they would not give it away.
So Joan Irvine, backed up by a small flotilla of public relations people, took her case to the public. She helped organize and attended a rally in Orange County at which she spoke out strongly in favor of the Irvine campus, citing all the benefits it would bring to the immediate community. She made more speeches and gave newspaper, radio, and television interviews. She proved remarkably skillful at manipulating the media, gathering them for formal press conferences as well as for chatty meetings, with drinks, at her house on Emerald Bay in Laguna Beach. She succeeded in getting press coverage of normally closed board meetings through the whimsical device of issuing temporary proxy votes to reporters—infuriating the board, of course, in the process; a key reporter for the Orange County Illustrated was once assigned a thousand shares of voting stock, making him a tycoon for a day. She had also begun carrying a tape recorder tucked under her suit jacket in order to record the acrimonious and often chaotic proceedings at board meetings. In the minutes of its meetings the board had often failed to record her negative votes. Now she had them on tape. She once brought a radio transmitter to a board meeting so that the goings-on could be broadcast outside the board room, but the signal got picked up by a car radio and Loyall McLaren heard about it and installed a special generator to jam her signal—or so she claimed. In the course of her publicity barrage she charged the majority stockholders with illegally taking over the company after her grandfather’s death, with mismanagement, with lack of leadership, and with setting up cozy deals with each other that benefited themselves more than the shareholders. She made the Irvine Company’s directors sound like miserly curmudgeons, narrow-minded enemies of higher education and the public weal. Her pretty but unsmiling face was soon familiar to readers and viewers throughout southern California.
Whether or not her well-publicized efforts were directly responsible for embarrassing the company into capitulation is a moot point, but it finally announced that it would give the university most of the acreage it wanted, and in the end gave all of it. Joan, understandably, took this as another personal victory in her battle with the “bozos.”
Two months after Myford Irvine’s death Loyall McLaren reported to the board on a visit he had made to Roger Stevens of New York, one of the country’s shrewdest real estate developers, and recommended that Stevens be retained by the company to draw up a development proposal. For once the board unanimously agreed. Stevens visited and toured the land and came up with a plan providing for the board to set up a separate development company, of which the Irvine Company would own 70 percent and the Stevens group 30 percent. The subsidiary would periodically buy land from the Irvine Company and pay the tax on the profits. Joan immediately objected. This, she said, would be fine for the foundation—which paid no taxes anyway—but it offered no tax shelter to her as an individual. She proposed an alternate plan, involving wholly owned subsidiaries that could be sold after five years with their shares distributed tax-free to shareholders. Once more the board voted her down.
After a hasty huddle with her lawyers Joan announced that she would sue to liquidate the Irvine Company if the board accepted the Stevens plan. Her lawyers had discovered an interesting loophole. For some reason that has never been quite clear to his heirs, old J.I. had had his company incorporated in the state of West Virginia. The lawyers had unearthed an arcane West Virginia law under which a shareholder of 20 percent or more stock could force the liquidation of a company if “sufficient cause” could be proved. Faced with this threat, the Stevens group withdrew from the rancorous arena, and Loyall McLaren angrily denounced Joan Irvine for disrupting the company’s attempts to carry on an orderly business.
Joan’s next important victory occurred in 1969. She had taken her case—along with her lawyers and public relations staff—to Washington, where, as a result of vigorous lobbying (and, reportedly, about a million dollars of her own money), she succeeded in getting certain clauses inserted into the Tax Reform Act of that year. According to the act as it pertained to foundations, a foundation could now own only a certain percentage of any given company—2 percent in the case of the Irvine Foundation’s ownership of Irvine Company stock. Furthermore, the act stated that all foundations must contribute to charities an amount equal to at least 6 percent of its holdings every year. The Tax Reform Act was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Nixon. Joan was delighted.
But the foundation’s lawyers then succeeded in postponing the foundation’s stock-divestiture date until 1983, and Joan was less pleased. In 1969 the citizens of Orange County were surprised to learn that their airport had become the sixth-busiest in the nation. What the experts on population growth had predicted had been right. Orange County was being overrun by Los Angeles. In 1970 the Irvine Company announced its ambitious plans for the largest totally master-planned city on the North American continent—the city of Irvine, to cover 53,000 acres, with a population of 430,000 predicted by the year 2000. Designed by the celebrated California architect and planner William Pereira—who, among other projects, designed the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Houston Center—it sounded like Joan’s visionary dream come true.
But throughout the 1970s, California building laws and codes changed so rapidly that often, no sooner had the ink dried on a builder’s sheaf of permits than new rules had been laid down. Environmentalist groups had to be given their say about development. The Irvine Company and Pereira had originally envisioned a kind of Space Odyssey luxury city for the rich, or at least the upper middle crust. But new laws specified that in any development provisions had to be made for economic and ethnic balances. In all these new regulations the Irvine Company found itself caught in the middle, and development did not proceed as smoothly or as speedily as had been hoped. And on top of all the other nuisances, there were the proliferating lawsuits—many of them instituted by Joan—and each new lawsuit seemed to set off half a dozen other actions.
The foundation meanwhile was somewhat grudgingly going about its business of conforming to the new Tax Reform law and exploring ways to divest itself of most of its company stock. Just how carefully the foundation was examining its options was not clear because of the directors’ fondness for secrecy; as one of the directors had once exploded to a reporter, “What goes on at Irvine is nobody else’s business!” But in the spring of 1974 an Irvine Foundation spokesman hinted broadly that the foundation had decided to offer its shares for sale on the open market.
For Joan this sounded as though final victory was in sight. On the open market the foundation’s holdings would certainly end up divided among many different buyers, and her 22 percent would very likely give her effective control of the company. But then, at the moment when her hopes were highest, they were dashed. The foundation spokesman, it seemed, had spoken with a forked tongue. Some months earlier the foundation had begun secret negotiations which, by the fall of 1974, had led to a tentative agreement with Mobil Oil for Mobil to buy out the foundation for $110,000,000. For Joan this spelled utter defeat. If the Mobil deal went through she would be forced into a merger and would have to accept Mobil shares in exchange for her Irvine shares. She would wind up as a small shareholder in a giant multinational corporation where she would have no power whatever. Naturally, the foundation had not apprised her of the pending Mobil deal; she had learned of it quite by accident. She promptly filed another lawsuit.
She alleged that the sale price was unreasonably low and therefore constituted a breach of faith with both the company’s minority stockholders and the foundation’s charity beneficiaries. Others joined her objections in Orange County. It was charged that Mobil was “fronting for the Arabs.” The Sierra Club claimed that Mobil would promote sprawling, automobile-dependent suburban growth so it could sell more gasoline, though there was no real evidence that Mobil had such a scheme in mind. Other loyal Orange Countians protested that their county was being invaded by “New York city slickers and foreigners.” (Mobil’s land-development subsidiary had its headquarters in Canada.) Mobil raised its price to $200,000,000, and by May 1976 the rest of the minority stockholders, most of whom were Joan’s cousins, had signed agreements to sell their shares to Mobil, thereby earning the boundless wrath of their embattled relative. It began to seem that “little jumping Joan”—now supported only by her mother, her stepfather, and her lawyers—was at last all alone and fifteen years of struggle had been for naught.
But then, just when things looked darkest, they suddenly turned brighter again. Unexpected support came from the office of the California attorney general, which joined Joan in a lawsuit of its own on behalf of the recipients of the charities. Mobil, the attorney general claimed, was trying to buy a billion dollars’ worth of California assets for only two hundred million. The people of California, the state contended, would lose the difference. The courts declared an injunction against the sale; the foundation appealed to have the injunction reversed, and their appeal was denied.
In January 1977 the case was back in the courts again, with Joan doing her best to block the Mobil take-over. Meanwhile two other bidders had entered the fray. One was Cadillac-Fairview, Ltd., a Toronto-based real estate development company controlled by the Bronfman family of Seagram’s. The second was Taubman-Allen, a group of investors headed by A. Alfred Taubman, a Michigan shopping-center developer, and Charles Allen, a New York investment banker. In addition to Messrs. Taubman and Allen the group included such heavyweight partners as Henry Ford II and Donald L. Bren, a wealthy California builder and developer.
In February 1977, suspecting that the key to success might lie in having Joan Irvine join forces with them, Taubman-Allen invited Joan to be a member of their consortium. It was intended as a gesture of goodwill toward her, and Joan graciously accepted the invitation. With that, Taubman-Allen became Taubman-Allen-Irvine. In the months that followed, a lively bidding battle for the company broke out among the three suitors. New bids were submitted every two or three days, and Mobil’s original $200,000,000 offer inched steadily upward. In April, Cadillac-Fairview dropped out, and the bidding between Mobil and Taubman-Allen-Irvine became heated, with a new bid coming in each day by noon. Finally, on May 20, 1977, Mobil dropped out, refusing to top a bid of $337,400,000 by Taubman-Allen-Irvine. In July 1977 the sale was completed. Taubman-Allen-Irvine merged the Irvine Company into itself, as a Michigan corporation, and changed its name back to the Irvine Company.
At last, it seemed, Joan had achieved total victory, including her aim of ousting the directors of the James Irvine Foundation. She also won a commitment from the new directors to speed up the pace of development of the land, as she had wanted the foundation to do, and immediately a seven-thousand-acre planned development was announced, to include marinas, golf courses, a dozen shopping centers, scores of new industrial, residential, and agricultural sites. Two thousand new housing units a year would be built on the Irvine property. From the sale of her Irvine stock Joan received $72,000,000 in cash plus 10 percent of the new company, making her one of eleven charter owners, and she was given a seat on the new company’s executive committee, where her “zeal and historical perspective” toward the Irvine property were intended to be put to full use. Surely, everyone thought, she must now be satisfied.
Alas, it seemed, she was not. The honeymoon with the new company lasted less than a year before she was back to her old habits, barraging the new board of directors with questions, challenges, accusations of mismanagement, and threats of lawsuits. Her activities placed a particular strain on the new company’s president, thirty-eight-year-old Peter Kremer, who began receiving as many as ten hand-delivered messages a day from Joan; over an eighteen-month period in 1978 and 1979, Kremer’s office had to cope with more than 1200 of her letters and angry memoranda. Her behavior on the executive committee was so uncooperative that she was removed from it. If anything, she was harassing the new board of directors even more enthuisastically than she had the old foundation.
In March 1979 she sued the company to block a $3,800,000 expansion of a pipeline designed to bring water to the development from northern California and the Colorado River. When a judge refused to grant her a restraining order, Joan sued Mr. Kremer and eight directors—who owned roughly 80 percent of the development company, including Mr. Bren, who owned 35 percent—for $1,000,000,000. All this friction came at a particularly bad time for the new Irvine Company owners, who, in spite of a refinanced debt of $240,000,000, were still not in the clear. A year earlier, trying to convince doubters that the heavy borrowing undertaken by the new owners was under control, Mr. Kremer had released glowing figures that showed a 60 percent revenue growth for the fiscal year 1978. By 1979, however, he was releasing no figures.
Today, Joan Irvine Smith is approaching fifty, still slim and attractive but with a touch of gray in her blond hair and new lines of determination around her wide mouth and large, hooded eyes, which she inherited from her grandfather. She spends as much as eighteen hours a day preparing for the various hearings, giving depositions, going over the fine points of her litigations with her team of attorneys, dictating her endless stream of letters. Meetings of the board of directors of the Irvine Company are still stormy affairs, full of reproach and bitterness and insults. Joan used to fly back and forth—piloting her own jet—between her beach house in southern California and her horse farm in Virginia, her legal residence. But now she has more or less permanently settled in her California camp—an armed camp, literally—to fight the fight she says she will never give up while there is any fight left in her.
The battle has cost her a lot more than imposing legal fees. It has caused a deep rift between Joan and her ever-loyal mother and the rest of the Irvine family. By 1979 it had cost her her fourth husband, Morton Smith; after sixteen years of marriage the Smiths were in the divorce courts. In the process she has become more antisocial than old J.I. ever was, and people who once considered themselves her friends complain that she never answers their letters, never returns their telephone calls—in fact, will not come to the telephone except to talk to one of her lawyers. When she goes out she is surrounded by a brace of armed bodyguards.
“The ranch seems to have taken over her life,” says her cousin, Linda Irvine Gaede, Myford Irvine’s daughter. “She’s become convinced that everyone is out to get her, that people are trying to do her in, that her whole family is trying to do her in. Why else the bodyguards? She thinks people are trying to kill her.” Linda Gaede accepts her father’s death as a suicide and attributes the dark talk of murder to Joan’s “paranoia.” Mrs. Gaede also believes that her grandfather died of natural causes on his fishing trip—“He’d had heart attacks before.” Linda Gaede adds, “Even though Joan is seven years older than I am, we used to be fairly close. But I haven’t spoken to her or set eyes on her in over a year, even though she lives right down the road. It is very difficult to remain close to someone in your family who keeps suing you.” From her spectacular house perched high on a bluff overlooking the Pacific, where pods of whale periodically pass by, and with a splendid view of Irvine Cove, where the Irvine children used to swim and surf, Linda Gaede can see the roof of the family beach house that all the Irvines put up several years ago, replacing an earlier structure. “The beach house was the last thing we did together as a family,” she says. “We all chipped in to build it—Joan, my cousin Katie, myself and my half brother Jimmy. But it’s hard to think of it as really a family place anymore.” Linda Gaede turns and points to a handsome jade horse that sits in a living room cabinet with other jade figures. “I managed to snap that horse away from Joan,” she says. “She collects jade too, but fortunately I heard that the horse was for sale while Joan was out of town. She’d have bought it instantly. But now it’s mine.”
What is it, in the end, that Joan Irvine wants, this good-looking, obsessive, extremely rich woman? Linda Gaede says: “She seems to just want more money, and to control the company. Also, it’s clear that she enjoys the fight for its own sake, just as our grandfather enjoyed a fight. She really should have been a man.” Others say she would be satisfied if she were made president of the company. But there is more to it than that, and Joan Irvine herself has said, “Why should I want more money? I already have more than I could possibly spend in a lifetime.” She has also often said that she sees the land as her “heritage” and that she sees herself as a “spiritual link” between the ranch’s pioneering past and its billowing future.
To Joan Irvine the ranch conveys a sense of place, of home, of family. It speaks of a young unlettered Irishman, the first James, down from the poverty of Belfast, who crossed the isthmus on a mule in search of Eldorado. After the disappointment of the gold fields he became a grocery clerk, and then turned to the land—three Mexican grants, all told, picked up as cheaply as the dirt itself—and with it the floods, the droughts, the chores, the plowing-under of the carcasses of thousands of dead sheep. There was love, and there were kisses behind the cellar door with a shepherd’s daughter, and more down by the bunkhouse where the ranch hands slept and got drunk on payday, then marriage to a pretty girl who came all the way from Cleveland, who gave him a strong son, the second James, whose feeling for the land was even more intense than his father’s, who would take up a gun to fight off the poachers and trespassers and thieves, even the big railroads that tried to muscle their way across the land—his land. Land that stretched from the mountains to the edge of the earth, the sea—as far as it would go; that was its particular significance.
And then, at last, the golden door that opened onto the polished parquet of the front parlor, the jade and teakwood furniture from Gump’s, the Spode and Baccarat and heavy tea services, the governesses for the children, the furs and the emerald earclips for Frances Anita’s birthday, and the clothes with Paris labels. And the violence, and the illnesses, and the deaths, and the betrayals, and little Joan riding in the saddle beside Grandpa, who had lost his favorite son and could not rid himself of thinking that he had helped kill his only daughter. From old J.I. she had grasped the fact that none of this had come easily. So many things had been tried, and had failed, on the land; promises had been broken and hopes had been dashed—first the cattle, wiped out in the Great Drought, then the prize Merinos, destroyed in another drought. Next came the cultivation of grapes, followed in 1881 by the terrible epidemic of grape phylloxera which in the next five years killed more than a million vines in Orange County. No sooner had the phylloxera been brought under control than the vineyard owners were dealt another blow: Prohibition. Next came citrus fruits, and now the orange groves were being plowed under for the next risky experiment—urban development, housing, shopping malls and greenbelts and office towers. On such attachments and associations and connotations there is no way to put a price, no way to subject any of it to logic. They had all fought and worked too hard and surrendered too much for what they had to give it up without a fight. To fight was just to give the land and its dead their due.
Her detractors have called Joan Irvine hard-boiled and bullheaded and arrogant. Jim Sleeper, a former Irvine official, refers to her sarcastically as “Saint Joan” and adds, “She’d pour water on a drowning man.” But she has also displayed traces of the kind of sentiment that her grandfather worked so hard to hide. Not long ago the Irvine Company proposed to drain the Peters Canyon Reservoir on the ranch. It was old and no longer used, and the lake bed could be put to more profitable developmental use. Understandably, the owners of homesites around the lake were not pleased with this proposal, and Joan took their side. She could remember, she said, the fun she and her grandfather had had fishing in the lake. She hoped the homeowners would be able to enjoy it with their grandchildren as well. The Peters Canyon Reservoir remained undisturbed. An Irvine Company official, struggling to compose his face to a rational expression when he speaks of Joan, says, “When she got her money we all thought she would pack up and go back to Virginia and raise horses and begin enjoying life.” To this Joan Irvine replies simply, “The land is still here, and so I’m still here.” She also likes to quote the comment of a real estate friend, Sandy Goodkin: “I would not say it is good land, but I happen to know that God dropped His option on the ranch only when Heaven came on the market.”
Of course, a sense of the importance of the continuity of generations is probably even stronger for a woman than for a man. In her long fight with the company Joan Irvine was also following something of a western tradition, that of women who picked up where their men left off. Such women as Mrs. Leland Stanford, out stumping the countryside for money for her university; Mrs. Huntington, daring to marry her own nephew; Flora Sharon, determined to marry a titled Englishman; the indomitable Alma Spreckels, set upon having her museum; blind Estelle Doheny, memorizing the names of all her orchids and holding on to the strings of her spendthrift husband’s fortune.
In the male world of California money, California women were showing the men that they could give them a run for it.