Finisterra
In California the approach of winter is not distinct. There is no true autumn, no real foliage change. Leaves fall, and all at once the elms and sycamores are bare. But the palm trees remain the same, and the rhododendron and the boxwood, and except for a damp chill in the air it is possible to believe that nothing really has occurred. Winter begins with rain. Suddenly the long dry summer is drenched with a great downpour. Streets run with water, rivers rise in their banks, and dry creek beds become slow-moving, muddy ponds with eucalyptus and poplar trunks standing in the middle of them. Swimming pools fill up to their gutters and turn murky green with algae. In the Valley the ditches and canals from the great dams in the north run swiftly. After this first rain every day seems to have more rain or heavy fog or cold wind, and for a period the land of eternal sunshine seems lost in a damp, swirling cloud.
A true Californian respects the rain and this curious half winter. For Californians never lose their awe of water, the water that made the desert bloom with peaches, apricots, artichokes, lettuce, and grapes. This great source of life returns to California each year, sometimes as early as September, sometimes as late as November. The rain will mean snowfall in the Sierras, and the amount of snowfall will affect the amount of runoff in the spring melt. At the same time, Californians are fatalistic about the rain, because it can offer not only a blessing but a bane as well. Too early a rain can damage fruit and vegetable crops ready for harvest. In the south too much rain can spur a lush growth of tall trees and shrubbery in the foothills, which, during the dry summer months, will become as parched as tinder and dangerously flammable. The slightest spark will set it off. The arsonist and incendiary are tempted. It is the easiest trick in the world to set a mountain range on fire: just leave a cigarette smoldering between the covers of a folded matchbook and walk rather rapidly away.
In southern California the rain washes the air of smog, but it also brings down mud slides and causes hillside houses to lose their footing and swimming pools to float up out of the ground, like blue boats, from the hydrostatic pressure in the earth. The rain brings down pollutants in the air—most the result of the internal-combustion engine—in the form of a slippery, oily slick, more treacherous than ice, and there are accidents and tie-ups on the freeways. Secretaries and executives alike phone in to say they will be late for work and meetings because of the traffic jams caused by the rain. Californians have grown cynical about the rain, because the water of life is also the water of death. It was bad weather, along with the effects of the Great Depression, along with the effects of Prohibition, that caused the father of Julio and Ernest Gallo to conclude that all was lost and end his life.
Land and water, life and death—these paired themes recur in any account of the California rich. Violence is never far away when life and water are at stake. Land and life, animal or vegetable, are insupportable without water. Our bodies are composed largely of water, and yet water plays tricks on us: we cannot live three days without it, nor can we survive much longer than three minutes underneath it. No wonder our feelings toward water are irrational, almost paranoid. Brigham Young, arriving in a waterless valley in Utah that supported, according to the legend, only a single scrubby pine tree, is said to have declared, “This is the place.” It must have looked to him like nowhere at all. But Young was tired and ill, too weary to cross the next flank of mountains, and it was as far as he wanted to go. He may well have meant to say, “All right, this place is as good a place as any.” To the California pioneers, who went farther, the inhospitable landscape of their destination also must have looked like nowhere. But like Brigham Young, they decided that Nowhere could be a place.
And after so much violence over California’s land and water, it is perhaps not surprising that violence has become a habit, that it has followed a number of California fortunes down to the present day and generation. The children of the rich, of course, are often notoriously rebellious. Patricia Campbell Hearst, W.R.’s granddaughter, refused to be a debutante at Mrs. Tucker’s ball. Later she refused to continue to attend the Roman Catholic mass. Later she was expelled from the Santa Catalina School for Girls in Monterey, allegedly for possessing marijuana. Still later she went to live with a young man named Steven Weed, and from that ménage she was violently removed—either by kidnapping or through her own complicity (one will never know which)—by a bizarre group dedicated to violence, which called itself the Symbionese Liberation Army. There followed a long litany of disorders, including rape, gun-slinging, armed robbery, murder, and a fiery, bloody shoot-out in Los Angeles.
All the incidental ironies were noted in the press, which brought out the almost incestuous relationships existing within the perfumed circle of San Franciscans. Miss Hearst’s best friend had been Patricia Tobin, a great-granddaughter of Michael H. de Young, William Randolph Hearst’s archenemy. Patricia Tobin’s father, Michael Tobin, was president of the Hibernia Bank, which Miss Hearst helped rob. During the lengthy period when Patty Hearst was at large she apparently traveled extensively throughout the United States. And yet, with that curious homing instinct so peculiar to native Californians, she was within a few blocks of her parents’ home when she was finally apprehended. (Interestingly, when she surrendered to the F.B.I., one of the first things she asked for was a glass of water.) The jail in Pleasanton, in which Miss Hearst was ordered to spend part of her sentence, was not much more than a stone’s throw from the great villa where her Great-grandmother Hearst had once given extravagant entertainments.
Most ironic of all, perhaps, was the fact that throughout her prolonged escapade Patty Hearst managed to create the kind of lurid front-page copy that her grandfather liked best. William Randolph Hearst might not have been flipping in his grave at all. He had never cared much about conventionality or even respectability. He would have loved the story.
The Hearst affair turned California into an armed camp. Telephone numbers were quickly changed and taken out of the directory. Addresses were removed from the Social Register. Children were escorted to and from schools by bodyguards, and the two fashionable San Francisco girls’ schools, Sarah Dix Hamlin’s and Katherine Delmar Burke’s, stopped printing student lists. Plainclothesmen mingled with guests at debutante balls; debutantes’ names were for the first time withheld from the press, along with the names of opera box-holders; electronic surveillance devices were installed throughout the Peninsula, and an additional guard was stationed at the gate of the Burlingame Country Club. Everywhere the California rich gathered there was fear, and kidnap threats proliferated throughout the state. People in the East had trouble relating to and rationalizing these events. It seemed easier to conclude that everyone in California was crazy.
The same conclusion was drawn at the time of the Charles Manson “family” murders at the home of actress Sharon Tate in Los Angeles when one of the victims turned out to be Abigail Folger, a beautiful Radcliffe-educated heiress to the Folger coffee fortune and a niece of Mrs. Robert Watt Miller, one of the grandest of San Francisco’s grandes dames. It seemed unbelievable that a proper San Francisco society girl had apparently become involved with the swinging drug-and-sex culture of Hollywood. For months after the Manson murders the rich of southern California went into, hiding.
In the summer of 1976 the California rich were jolted again. A busload of Chowchilla schoolchildren were kidnapped and, with their bus driver, buried alive in a moving van that had been sunk in a dried mudhole. The newspapers were filled with harrowing accounts of how the driver was able to dig the children out and save them from suffocation. The motive behind the crime was unclear and seemed senseless; none of the parents of the schoolchildren was wealthy. But one of the alleged perpetrators of this nasty business, it turned out, was. He was twenty-four-year-old Frederick Newhall Woods III, a descendant of one of California’s oldest and proudest families. The Newhall ranch had once rivaled the Irvine ranch in size and productivity. One of young Woods’s relatives, Margaret Newhall, had married Atholl McBean, the largest shareholder in Standard Oil of California. The Newhalls had been prominent in affairs involving youth and education. It had been old George Newhall, according to one of many legends, who had first suggested to Leland Stanford that he build a university in memory of his dead son.
Of course, by the late 1970s not all the descendants of California’s founding families were coming to bad or peculiar ends. A number of Floods, Mackays, and Crockers remain in California leading quiet, sedately moneyed lives. Down on the Peninsula, Michael de Young Tobin and his wife, the former Sally Fay, live not far from his Aunt Phyllis Tucker, the surviving de Young sister. As a hobby, Michael and Sally Tobin collect fine wines, which they store in a specially built heat-and-humidity-controlled cellar. As an oenophile, Sally Tobin says, “I think it’s almost insulting not to serve wine with meals. Even to people I didn’t really want to meet I’d serve wine—and not a California wine either. As for food, we simply won’t serve the ordinary. Steak is for butchers.” As a San Francisco society person, Mrs. Tobin is as discriminating and traditionalist as her husband’s aunt. “Frankly, I’m a snob,” she says. “So many unattractive people have come to California that I determined to see to it that my children mingle only with their own kind.” Mrs. Tobin also points out the subtle social distinction between Burlingame and the somewhat amorphous town of Hillsborough that Burlingame abuts. Of the two, Hillsborough is the better address, and the Tobins live in Hillsborough. “But,” says Mrs. Tobin, “we always say we live in Burlingame. If you hear people say they live in Hillsborough, you can be certain they are parvenus or climbers.”
Many of the current generation of the California rich have remained active in the community. Gordon Getty, for example, a grandson of J. Paul Getty (once called “the richest man in the world” and a sometime Californian), is interested primarily in music and opera and in seemingly little else. Others remain active in the business community. Adolph Spreckels’ grandson, John Rosekrans, rather than relax with a large inherited fortune, developed a lively and successful business of his own, manufacturing and marketing water-sports equipment—a popular body-surfing board, a floating pool lounge chair, even a floating transistor radio. His brother, Adolph Spreckels Rosekrans, is a prominent San Francisco architect. Though John Rosekrans is now capable of living independently of his Spreckels money, he remains proud of his family’s history in California. It saddens him that when Kay Spreckels Gable’s son (by “bad uncle” Adolph Spreckels, Jr.) died in an automobile accident, leaving no offspring, there were no more Spreckelses in America to carry on the family name.
Still others, after a taste of city life, have turned back to the land, where their forebears got their start. John D. Spreckels’ great-granddaughter Alexandra Kelham married a handsome Stanford-educated stockbroker, W. Robert Phillips, Jr. Several years ago, after a number of years in San Francisco, the Phillipses decided to move permanently to the country, to a spacious and sprawling Napa Valley ranch that had been Mrs. Phillips’ mother’s summer place. Here on some hundred and eighty rolling acres of the Valley’s flank, the Phillipses have been growing wine grapes. “The soil here,” Bob Phillips points out, “is very similar to that of the Burgundy and Champagne districts of France, and the Moselle and Rhine areas of Germany. So is the climate. The days are hot and dry and the nights are cool. Wine grapes don’t need much irrigation. Wine, they say, needs to ‘struggle’ to grow.”
Wine has become the Napa Valley’s biggest business, and nearly seventy bonded wineries operate throughout the Valley’s twenty-five-mile length. Unlike the Gallo family’s operation in Modesto, where the emphasis is on mass production, the Napa Valley winegrowers—whose collective output amounts to less than 5 percent of California’s annual production—stress quality. In 1976 two of the Valley’s smallest wineries—Château Montelena and Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars—produced wines that were judged better than some of the greatest wines from France’s Bordeaux and Burgundy vineyards in a European competition. To be sure, a number of the winegrowers in Napa are gentleman farmers, wealthy Californians who operate at a loss as a tax shelter. But Bob and Alexandra Phillips are determined to turn a profit with their grapes. Both work long hours in the vineyard during the harvest season. For her own table Alexandra Phillips maintains a vegetable garden and fruit trees. Though her house is large, she does her own cooking and housework. “After all, Claus Spreckels was a farmer,” she says. “He raised sugarcane and beets. He was my great-great-grandfather, though he only died in 1908, just twenty-six years before I was born. Time gets telescoped in California. Our history is really very short. The distant past was really only yesterday. Everything today has a direct bearing on and relationship to our past.”
Alexandra Phillips can remember that in 1940, when she was a little girl, a mysterious tunnel was uncovered, leading from the basement of the James Flood mansion—by then the Pacific Union Club—into the basement of the house of her grandfather, Alexander Hamilton, on the other side of California Street. The tunnel was high enough for a man to stand in. She often wonders what the purpose of this tunnel was, what the “direct connection” between her family and the Floods might have been. At the time the tunnel was discovered, the Chronicle commented that the Floods and the Hamiltons “supposedly were no more than casual neighbors.”
One thing that worries such winegrowers as the Phillipses is the fact that the suburban sprawl from San Francisco, Berkeley, and Oakland has been slowly but steadily encroaching on the Napa Valley, only about ninety minutes by freeway from the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. A number of well-heeled city folk have discovered the pretty little valley, with its climate much clearer and crisper than foggy San Francisco’s. They have begun buying and handsomely restoring the valley’s charming Victorian gingerbread houses. Napa, once a drowsy cattle-ranching town, has become chic. A former general store has become a gourmet food shop that sells, among other things, fresh beluga caviar. Trendy new boutiques and restaurants keep opening. So do new communities of mobile homes. As the land in the Napa Valley becomes more attractive to developers its price keeps going up, providing owners with increased temptation to sell. Today even a mediocre acre of grape land goes for as much as sixteen thousand dollars. The fate of the Napa Valley may one day be the same as that of the Irvine ranch: development, housing, shopping centers, office towers, a Sheraton hotel with a revolving cocktail lounge on the roof. Growers such as the Phillipses of course hope that this won’t happen and that the valley will be able to cling to some vestiges of its agricultural past.
In southern California, Bernardo Yorba is the great-great-grandson of Don José Antonio Yorba, who came to California with Gaspar de Portolá and Father Junípero Serra in 1767 to expel the Jesuits. Today the early Spanish families, many of whom were originally Catalans, are intricately interrelated through marriages, and Bernardo Yorba’s cousins are Peraltas, Carillos, Sepulvedas, Serranos, and a great many other Yorbas, as his great-grandfather, also named Bernardo, had twenty-three children. Mr. Yorba himself has ten, fecundity being a Yorba family trait. Bernardo Yorba, however, is unique in the fact that his house in the Santa Ana Canyon stands on land that was once a part of the great Yorba rancho—some sixty-two thousand acres, mas o menos, which the original Yorba was granted by the King of Spain. Like other great ranchos, Don José Antonio Yorba’s Rancho Santiago de Santa Ana supported many thousands of head of cattle until the Great Drought, at which time much of the land was lost to gringo moneylenders. Later, reduced in size, the Yorba rancho was given over to groves of Valencia oranges. Bernardo Yorba still grows Valencia oranges on his canyon-side estate, but, he says, “Only enough to squeeze into my vodka.” The Yorbas are also notable among the old Californianos in the fact that through the generations they managed to remain quite prosperous. Bernardo Yorba is a real estate developer and owns several large shopping centers in Orange County.
Bernardo Yorba is a large, handsome olive-skinned man in his forties, and he is proud of his heritage, which he prefers to think of as Mexican. “My mother used to say, ‘We’re not Mexican, we’re Spanish,’” he says. “But I’d point out to her the wording of the original grant, which says it was granted to ‘José Antonio Yorba, a Mexican.’” Yorba works in an office in the Bank of America Building in Anaheim, an office filled with family photographs and other bits of memorabilia, including a collection of antique saddles, some of them trimmed with sterling silver. He is a proud member of the Congress of Charros, a patriotic-historic Mexican American group that puts on elaborate cowboy costumes and performs on such occasions as the Rose Bowl Parade. Yorba and his family, who all speak flawless Spanish—and even speak English with a trace of a Spanish accent—make frequent trips to Mexico, retracing the past, keeping track of their heritage. “I feel a great obligation to my heritage,” Bernardo Yorba says. “We must show the rest of the world that we continue to build on our heritage. We have to make a contribution. We have to participate.” In a drawer of a filing cabinet Mr. Yorba has collected ten fat folders of heritage—family trees, old documents, deeds, letters, chains of title—one folder for each of his children.
Among the contributions Mr. Yorba makes to the Orange County community are the various school projects he has headed. He is also executive vice-president of the children’s hospital and is a director of the Angels Stadium Corporation. “We Yorbas are still doing our share, pulling our weight,” he says. “My wife and I want to set that kind of example for our children.”
Though more than a hundred years have passed, Bernardo Yorba still speaks bitterly of the cupidity of the gringo moneylenders at the time of the drought, when much of the Yorba rancho became part of the Irvine ranch, and of the federal government’s concurrent insistence on challenging the Spanish land grants, which had been established a century earlier. Had it not been for these two forces, Mr. Yorba points out quite correctly, the history of California would have been quite different, and the state would consist of many Irvine ranches, at least one of which would belong to Bernardo Yorba. “Now everywhere you look in California is government land,” he says. “We need to produce off this land, but we can’t.”
Yorba also blames the United States government for fostering the notion that Mexicans are a shiftless, corrupt, lazy, and ignorant people. “Mexicans are an ancient, sophisticated, and hardworking people, with deep roots in both the Spanish and the Indian cultures,” he says. “When Spain conquered Latin America, it didn’t try to drive the native Indians out the way the English colonists did in North America. Spain converted the Indians, yes, but conversion is an assimilationist move, which is the opposite of expulsion and killing and forcing the Indians onto reservations. If you ask me, the real destiny of California is contingent on our relations with Mexico. We’ve stomped all over Mexico for years, and the American oil companies have exploited the Mexicans from old Doheny on down. Now, of course, when Mexico has made some new oil discoveries, we suddenly want to get all friendly with Mexico. Talk about cynicism. Naturally the Mexicans want to get a good price for their oil, but we seem to expect them to give it to us. That idiot Schlesinger went down to Mexico, and when the Mexicans mentioned their price he called them bandits—banditos—and then couldn’t seem to understand why López Portillo felt insulted!”
Like many other Californians, Bernardo Yorba freely admits that he has often employed Mexicans as laborers who are illegal aliens. “They’re hard workers, and they’re good workers because they love and respect the land. After all, this is land that my great-grandfather Bernardo first irrigated by diverting water from the Santa Ana River. The Mexicans are honest, they’re religious, they’re never drunk. The Mexican will always make arrangements to have the major share of his money sent home to his family. Of course every now and then I’ll get a phone call from the Immigration Office and someone will say, ‘Sorry, Bernardo, but we’ve got your boys.’”
“Finisterra”—land’s end, the edge of the world—is the name Linda Irvine Gaede and her husband gave to their spectacular home high on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean in a walled and heavily guarded enclave called Irvine Cove. (Like other wealthy families, the Irvines have had to cope with their share of kidnap threats.) From the many westward-facing terraces and patios of Finisterra one can watch seals and dolphins and whales go by, and swarms of pelicans fishing among the rocks. In the garage hangs one of a matching pair of monogrammed, custom-made, hand-tooled sterling silver saddles that J.I. had made for Big Kate and himself by Visalia, the great California saddlemaker. This was Big Kate’s saddle. The one belonging to J.I., with his initials carved in silver, has disappeared, along with a number of other treasures, including most of J.I.’s pen-and-ink drawings that were stored in the old Irvine mansion.
In the hills behind the house, deer and possum still run, and a family of roadrunners has established itself in a wind-bent cypress tree. There is indeed a sense of the finite here, of coming to the end, at Irvine Cove. One could not really call the landscape beautiful—dramatic, yes, but the vistas are too stark and demanding for beauty. This of course is true of much of California, and newcomers are often disappointed to find that much of the state is not prettier than it is. The rocky hills are too tough, dry, and implacable; they fail to soothe the eye. The valleys are too broad and flat and mean. It is no wonder that so many Californians use the word “respect” when they speak of the land. Though the Irvine family is far richer than the Yorbas—and became so, one might well conclude, at the Yorbas’ expense years ago—Linda Irvine Gaede and Bernardo Yorba are good friends. Bernardo Yorba also expresses great “respect” for Linda’s cousin Joan, who, in her long battles with the family company, was defending her heritage too. Linda also respects Joan, even though the two women no longer speak. Linda does not agree with Joan’s motives at all, but she respects them. “She has her rights too,” Linda says.
When the Irvine Company was reorganized in 1977—along lines that it was hoped would satisfy Joan—Linda Gaede and her husband bought back into the new company: “It was too hard to let go. There were all the emotional attachments to the land and to the family.” Though Linda Gaede spent her early childhood on the San Francisco Peninsula, when her grandfather died the family moved to southern California. At first Linda’s mother resisted the idea of living in the little ranch town of Tustin, and the family settled in Pasadena, from which Myford Irvine commuted to the ranch. But soon he too was drawn back to the ranch, where Linda grew up and went to school and, with her bicycle and her horses, rode back and forth between her cousins’ houses. “I’m not a city person,” she says. “I never will be. This is home.”
This attachment to the land, which often seems so irrational, might provide a further, final insight into the haunting circumstances of Myford Irvine’s death. To begin with, Mike Irvine was a tough man—healthy, hard as nails and, like his father, a bit autocratic. In fact the family often commented on how Mike’s brother, Jase, had inherited their mother’s gentle, soft-spoken, humorous nature. Mike’s tender side displayed itself only in some of the songs he wrote, such as a romantic ballad called “Do You Remember?” Otherwise, like his father, he was all business, an outdoorsman and sportsman. He and his wife liked to take hiking, camping, and riding trips into the mountains; on one trip they spent several weeks living with a remote tribe of Indians. Mike was also a conservative, conventional man. He joined the Kiwanis Club and attended meetings faithfully. In Orange County he was liked for his lack of pretension. He never comported himself like a rich man, and he was often teased because his favorite golfing sweater had a large hole in one sleeve. He was frugal, hated to lose a golf ball, and in the golf games he played with friends, the stakes were never higher than fifty cents or a dollar. (Which makes the argument that he was involved in high-stakes gambling in Nevada seem a bit implausible.) At the same time, he could be philanthropic. In 1953 he spent more than $250,000 to host the International Boy Scout Jamboree on the Irvine ranch.
Blessed with hindsight, a number of people after his death said that Mike Irvine had just not been “cut out for” ranching, but this is unfair. In the eleven years he headed the Irvine Company a number of important steps were taken by him in his role of guiding the ranch’s shift from agricultural to urban development. Along the coast he headed the development of such key areas as the expensive housing tracts of Irvine Terrace and Cameo Shores. Under his administration the Irvine Coast Country Club was built and the search for the site of the University of California at Irvine was begun. Under Mike Irvine’s leadership the first water from the Colorado River was delivered to the ranch, giving the area the capacity to sustain a larger population increase. While he was in charge, the stage was being set for the master-plan development scheduled for the 1960s and 1970s. Years later Thelma Irvine would recall driving with her husband in 120-degree heat through the well-named Fireball Ranch he had acquired in the Imperial Valley, with a cowboy sitting on the hood of the jeep taking random shots at what seemed like a living sea of dog-size wild jackrabbits. Mike Irvine turned the Fireball into cotton. He developed still another ranch in the Napa Valley. To friends he often expressed his greatest wish, which was, he said, to run the ranch operations just as J.I. would have done. To those who knew him, and to whom suicide is considered an act of cowardice, Mike Irvine was no coward.
In 1950, Mike Irvine asked his wife for a divorce. This came as a great shock to Thelma Irvine, who had then been married to him, more or less happily—or so she thought—for twenty-eight years. It was an even greater shock when she discovered who the woman was whom Mike wanted to marry. She was a pretty blond divorcée named Gloria Wood White, somewhat younger than Mike. Thelma Irvine had considered Gloria White one of her closest friends; long after Gloria’s divorce from William White, Thelma had continued to send Christmas checks to Gloria’s children. Furthermore, Gloria White was practically a member of the family. Her first husband had been Big Kate’s son by her first marriage; in other words, Mike Irvine wanted to marry his stepmother’s former daughter-in-law. Mike and Thelma were divorced, and later that year Mike and Gloria White were married.
Today, at eighty, living alone in a large apartment overlooking the Pacific, Thelma Irvine is bright, chipper and healthily tanned from a daily four-mile walk. She no longer harbors any real resentment toward the woman, now dead, who replaced her in her husband’s affections years ago. But she is convinced that her husband’s second marriage was not a happy one. She and Myford Irvine, for example, had never bothered to be listed in the San Francisco Social Register. Gloria, on the other hand, wanted a listing and saw to it that her husband got one for her. She was demanding in other ways, particularly in terms of money. Others who remember the couple agree that there were frequent money arguments. In 1953, Gloria Irvine gave birth to a son whom the couple named James Myford Irvine.
On Sunday morning, January 11, 1959, Mike Irvine awoke at 7:30, as usual, had breakfast, and spent the morning pottering about the house in his usual fashion. According to Gloria’s later account, at one o’clock she, Mike, and five-year-old Jimmy, whom his father adored, sat down for lunch in the dining room, and Mike Irvine had a can of beer. He then announced his intention of going down to the ranch office to do some work. This in itself was odd; it was Sunday, and the office was closed. Gloria said that it was time for Jimmy’s nap, and Mike Irvine said, “Goodbye, son, I’ll see you when you get up.” Gloria Irvine said that she also wanted to take a nap. Nothing, according to Gloria, seemed wrong.
At three o’clock, in Gloria’s account of the day, she awoke from her nap, roused her son, and drove with him down to the ranch office to visit her husband. This, she said, was a customary practice. That, at least, was what Gloria Irvine told Deputy Coroner James Pond, but this is even odder than the fact that Mike Irvine should have gone to his office on a Sunday afternoon. The ranch house and Myford’s Irvine’s office were next door to each other, barely a hundred feet apart. No one ever drove between the two places, and Thelma Irvine remembers that she often used to carry bowls of flowers over to the office from the house. Why would Gloria and her son have driven to the office? To collect him and drive him home? He always walked the meager distance. In any case, as Gloria’s account to the deputy coroner continued, she arrived at the office, found no one there, and then drove home.
As she walked with her son from the garage to the house she noticed that the sky had darkened with a half-winter threat of rain, and Jimmy pointed out a light that was burning in the window of a basement storeroom. The two went down into the storeroom to investigate, and there they found Mike Irvine, slumped in a kneeling position, his right side resting against several cases of liquor and his head a few inches from the floor. Gloria Irvine screamed, seized her son’s hand, and ran upstairs to telephone her doctor, Thomas B. Rhone, whom she told, “My husband has shot himself!” In less than twenty minutes Dr. Rhone was at the ranch house and telephoned the Orange County coroner.
On the left side of Mike Irvine’s body, with his hand resting on the barrel, lay a 16-gauge Belgian Browning automatic shotgun, and on the other side of the body, beside a cardboard box, was a Smith & Wesson six-inch .22 caliber blue steel six-shot revolver. The shotgun had one expended shell casing in the chamber, and another expended casing was found on the floor about three feet away. On top of a case of liquor was a partially filled box of .22 caliber long-rifle cartridges; one cartridge was lying on the box, one on the floor, and one expended casing was in the chamber. One live round remained in the chamber, and the other chambers of the cylinder were empty.
The two shotgun blasts had entered Mike Irvine’s abdomen. The bullet from the revolver had entered his right temple. There were powder burns there. There were also powder burns found on the index and middle fingers of his left hand. But Mike Irvine was not left-handed. And to have fired a bullet into his right temple with his left hand would seem to have required the skill of a contortionist.
In concluding that all three gunshot wounds were self-inflicted, the coroner reasoned that Mike Irvine, holding the shotgun near the muzzle, had triggered the first shot into his abdomen with his right hand. Then, since the gun was an automatic, a second shot into the abdomen, directly into the first, had been caused by the gun’s recoil against a concrete wall and the corresponding weight of Mike Irvine’s body. Then, still conscious, Mike had reached for the revolver with his left hand and had finished the job with a bullet in his temple. Medical tests were made for both alcohol and barbiturates. No trace of either was found. The house was thoroughly searched for a suicide note and, as we know, none was found.
The coroner placed the time of death at two o’clock in the afternoon while Gloria Irvine and her son were supposedly peacefully asleep upstairs. The Irvine mansion was old, uninsulated, full of creaks. It was a big white-shingled place, much added-to over the years until it eventually contained some thirty rooms; like Topsy, the house “just growed.” It had been renovated at least six times to suit the tastes of a series of Irvine women, but it was still an old house. Much of its plumbing was also old, and periodically a toilet in an upstairs bathroom would flush all by itself; its erupting geyser could be heard all over the house, and the family would laugh and joke about ghosts. (In 1968, not quite ten years after Mike Irvine’s death, some faulty wiring sparked and the mansion was all but destroyed by fire; the marquetry floors, hand-carved balustrades of the staircases, and other rich details were deemed irreplaceable, and the charred remains of the house were razed.) By 1959, J.I.’s pack of yelping hounds no longer shared the house with its human occupants, and the house was a quiet place. Yet no sleeper on the second floor had been disturbed by the angry sounds of gunfire. On the first floor the Irvines’ cook, Opal Johnson, was in the kitchen, but heard nothing. Neither did a maid, Lois Doak, who was gossiping with Opal Johnson at the time. The two servants testified that they were aware of no signs of marital discord between Mr. and Mrs. Irvine.
Gloria Irvine could offer no real explanation for her husband’s suicide, nor could she say why, when telephoning Dr. Rhone, she had immediately leaped to the conclusion that he had killed himself. She did say, however, that since Christmas her husband had seemed depressed, though she apparently had not considered his condition severe enough to inquire into its cause. True, there had been his near-frantic efforts to raise a large sum of money in the few days preceding his death and his remark to the family that he was “sitting on a keg of dynamite.” But the family, while apparently perfectly willing to help him raise the money, had for some reason not bothered to inquire as to what the keg of dynamite was. At one point Joan Irvine’s stepfather, Judge Clarke, had asked Mike Irvine why he didn’t borrow the money he needed from a bank. Rather airily Mike had replied, “I’ve never had to borrow from a bank before, and I’m not going to start now.”
The mystery deepened when the details of Mike Irvine’s estate were revealed. He died worth well over $10,000,000 and had an income of over $500,000 a year. Why should he have had such a pressing need for cash?
In a book on organized crime called The Grim Reapers the author, Ed Reid, speculates that Mike Irvine had somehow got involved with the underworld and gambling and in the building of Caesars Palace Hotel in Las Vegas. But Mr. Reid produces no hard evidence to support this and, admitting that he is merely guessing, concludes, “The answer may lie in the sands of Las Vegas, under dunes flattened by the weight of Caesars Palace and the pressure of unhappy and unholy memories.” It does seem that Mike Irvine would have been too thoughtful a man, too considerate of his family, to have destroyed himself in a basement storeroom, in such an untidy way, while his wife and young son were asleep upstairs. There is also the illogical fact of the two guns. Mike Irvine was an expert hunter, familiar with firearms and their various capabilities, well aware that the simplest, neatest way to dispatch a life is a bullet between the eyes. Would he have ended his own life so clumsily? Had he, in preparing for his suicide, actually brought two guns into the basement with the thought that if the shotgun into the belly didn’t work he would have the pistol handy as insurance? Finally, there is the impossible-to-answer question of why the pistol was held in the left hand and fired into the right temple.
Thelma Irvine did not attend her former husband’s funeral, reasoning that there was already “too much notoriety” surrounding his death. But considering that she had been married to him for twenty-eight years, that he had courted her for three years before that, and that she had known him throughout college, she feels, with some justification, that she knew the man better than did any other person. She gives no credence to either the suicide theory or the talk of Las Vegas connections. “He never went to Las Vegas,” she says. “He hated to gamble. He was a terrible poker player. When he played golf with me he refused to play for money, because, with my handicap, it would mean that I would probably win. He was not the suicidal type. He never suffered from depressions. I remember once at a dinner party, not long afterward, Linda asked a doctor friend, Dr. Monaco, if he thought her father could have been a suicide. Dr. Monaco simply shook his head and said, ‘Impossible!’”
Thelma Irvine also finds it impossible to credit Gloria Irvine’s account of what happened that fatal afternoon. “He never went to the office on a Sunday. The office was closed. The shooting had to have taken place somewhere else. I knew that house like the back of my hand. I knew that storeroom where he was found. I’d remodeled it myself. It used to be a photographic darkroom. But my husband never went into the basement for any reason. The room was directly underneath the kitchen and the servants’ quarters. Why didn’t any of the servants hear three shots? I knew the bedroom where Gloria supposedly was sleeping. It had been my bedroom. She would have heard the shots.” Later there were stories in southern California that Myford Irvine had been drinking heavily in the months before his death, and Thelma Irvine finds this also difficult to believe. “He wasn’t a strict teetotaler, like his father,” she says, “but he didn’t really like to drink. Now and then he’d have a drink just to be sociable, but that was it. Can a man’s personality change so completely in such a short time? I just don’t see how.
“I know he was under tremendous pressure after his brother died. It was an awful strain. After all, he wasn’t trained for the ranch. He was trained for the city. But he bore up wonderfully under the strain and never complained about anything.” In Thelma Irvine’s opinion, Mike Irvine’s death was somehow connected with the family, the company, and the land. At the time of his death he was in the process of building a new ocean-side house at Corona del Mar. He was not building it for himself, however. He was building it for Gloria. It was something Gloria wanted. She hated the old ranch house and wanted a house that was big and modern, with lots of glass. The house was going to cost $325,000 in 1959 dollars.
In the weeks before his death he had complained to friends that he had misgivings about building this house for Gloria. He had gone to see his personal physician, Dr. Horace Leecing, who had also treated J.I. before him, and had complained of nervousness and insomnia. Today Dr. Leecing, a retired country doctor in his late seventies—who remembers when he charged two dollars for an office visit and three dollars for a house call at the Irvine ranch—recalls Myford Irvine telling him that he thought the new house was “too pretentious” and that he had had second thoughts about giving in to Gloria and moving into such a big, expensive place. He said that he frequently lay awake at night worrying about this project, regretting that he had committed himself to it, and said that he would prefer not to move but to remain on the land of his forebears, on the traditional Irvine ranch. “He told me that living in that house would be like living in a fishbowl,” Dr. Leecing says. “He said he would feel like a fish out of water living there.” Dr. Leecing also received the distinct impression that Mike Irvine’s marriage to Gloria had become a very unhappy one. Dr. Leecing prescribed a variety of sleeping pills and tranquilizers, which Mike Irvine had been taking, and entered a diagnosis of “acute depression.”
On the afternoon of his death Mike Irvine was seen at the construction site of the new house, walking around on an open sea-facing deck as though inspecting it or, perhaps, saying goodbye to it. So possibly he had not gone to his office at all.
Thelma Irvine does not go so far as to suggest that Gloria Irvine hired someone to kill her husband so that she wouldn’t be prevented from having her house; Gloria, with a large inheritance from her husband, did indeed eventually move into it. “But,” Thelma says, “there was a man on the ranch who did commit suicide not long after what happened to Mike. And I’ve always wondered whether there might have been a connection.” The man, a company electrician, had been among the first at the scene of the tragedy, and Thelma wonders whether he knew something that might have “weighed on his mind.” Thelma also questions whether Mike Irvine’s death might have been connected with Brad Hellis, the man who had been with J.I. on his final fishing trip and who had resigned from the Irvine Company rather than face Joan’s threatened lawsuit for financial wrongdoing. “Brad Hellis and Walter Tubach were in charge of buying land for J.I.,” says Mrs. Irvine, “but they were cheating J.I. They were buying the best land for themselves and only letting J.I. have what they didn’t want. At one point my husband offered to make Brad a vice-president of the company, but Brad turned it down. Why? Because he knew he couldn’t get away with that sort of thing with Myford.” Had Myford found out too much about Brad Hellis’ speculations, and had Hellis arranged for Mike’s murder to silence him? Neither Hellis nor Gloria Irvine is alive to answer these dark allegations.
Interestingly, Dr. Leecing—who remains firmly convinced that Mike Irvine’s death was a simple suicide (Leecing’s testimony was an important deciding factor in the coroner’s verdict)—also connects the death with Brad Hellis, but for a quite different reason. “Brad was like another son to J.I.,” says Dr. Leecing. “He was Mike Irvine’s best friend. But Brad was another one of the causes of Mike’s depression. At the time of Joan’s lawsuit, and Brad’s falling-out with the company, he offered to resign, and it was Mike, as president, who had the deciding vote in accepting his resignation. Later he said to me, ‘I feel I’ve betrayed my best friend.’ But of course he was being forced to decide between the demands of his family and the demands of friendship. Mike had to decide in favor of the family, but he felt terrible about it. Brad Hellis was tops, and so was Walter Tubach. At the Rotary Club everybody loved them. Brad was a man of the highest integrity. I would trust Brad as much as I would my own father.”
And so we are left with the unsolved riddle of Mike Irvine’s death, a riddle that has a tantalizing number of possible solutions, interconnected, and yet none quite plausible. Perhaps the true villain was the land. Had the land taken hold of him too, as it had done to so many others? Had it possessed him, the way it appeared to possess his niece Joan? Did he take his own life rather than risk the shock of moving off the Irvine land, even though Corona del Mar was only a few miles away? Perhaps. If so, the secret does not lie under the sands of Las Vegas. It lies with Mike Irvine in the land, in the plot of Irvine ranchland where the others of the family are gathered, in the ashes of the old mansion and along the brown hills and among the mesquite clumps and the old canals and levees, in the orange groves and sheep trails and horse paths, all the dusty roads that lead to Finisterra.
Or perhaps the secret was revealed long ago in Peck’s 1837 New Guide to the West: “… the real Eldorado is still further on.”