July 15, 1957

The painting on the cover of Time speaks to us a bit
differently now than it did to the readers of 1957. There
is little room for subtlety in an illustration intended to compete on
newsstands with so many other magazines, forcing artist Henry Koerner to convey a simple message that could be grasped immediately.

There is Norman Chandler, a captain of Southern California industry,
with the visual shorthand for Los Angeles that has become such a
cliche: City Hall, palm trees and the mountains. Looking dignified and
eminently trustworthy, with his hair parted down the middle like the baritone in a barbershop quartet, he is holding a copy of the Los Angeles Times
folded into a sailor’s hat as if he were about to play with one of the
younger members of the next crop of Chandlers.

There are several messages we can see today that might have eluded the
harried newsstand customer of 1957: The inference that the Los Angeles Times
was best used for something other than reading (the article, in fact, calls it "neither a
great paper nor a poor one") and perhaps that Chandler was a tin-pot
Napoleon not to be taken seriously — at least nowhere outside crazy
Southern California. We might even surmise that The Times was nothing
but an expensive plaything for the Chandler family.

The anonymous cover story
conveys a similar message with just as little subtlety. Bristling with
biased and unnecessary adjectives (beaches are not merely beaches but
"the very Pacific beaches") and occasional odd metaphors (Gen. Harrison Otis
"began to carve his name in the sand with his editorial cannon balls,")
Time paints the portrait of a noisy, shrill city that could be accompanied by
hustle-bustle music and staccato notes from a xylophone, like one of "The March of Time" newsreels:

Nourished by a generous soil and a benign climate, this open-toed,
pastel empire last week beat with a great hum-thrumming vitality. On
Wilshire Boulevard, rivet guns prattled into the fresh steel of new
office buildings. The reiterated whop of the hammered nail rang out in
a 6,000-house development on San Fernando farmland, in a 17,000-house
subdivision in the tawny hills 40 miles to the southwest in Palos
Verdes—and wherever bulldozers sliced down citrus groves to make room
for more.

From the swarms of workers in electronics and aircraft plants
came one big, tumultuous earache. And millions of nerves throbbed with
the nightmare of 3,000,000 cars (one for every 2.2 people v. Detroit’s
one for every 3.2) cascading over 204 miles of multilaned freeways.   

Added to this was the arrival in Los Angeles last week of 4,200 popeyed
newcomers (25 every hour of the year). Like the ever-moving,
ever-changing populace that moved aside to make room for them, the new
Angelenos eagerly got set to join the scurrying rhythms and busy
polyphony: to work more change, to make more moves, more money, new
houses, new businesses—and to crowd out of the way of next week’s
horde of 4,200.
 

In this bouncing scenery, the one unchanging force
is the Los Angeles Times. Each morning it drops with a thick,
self-assured plop on 462,257 doorsteps from Anaheim to Azusa,* like a
faintly welcome striped-pants uncle (wealthy but voluble). Neither a
great newspaper nor a poor one, the Times, from its downtown limestone
monolith, serves as an unshakable herald, chronicling the region with
loving detail, goading Angelenos toward the megalopolitan destiny
ordained by Harrison Otis.

The Times proudly announced the upcoming article in a Page 2
story–full of quotes and without a single quibble–as if the Chandlers
were thrilled that the East Coast news establishment was writing about
them at all.

From our perspective, the Time article is not terribly flattering but noteworthy for several reasons. It certainly falls into
the trap of portraying the Chandler family as a dynasty of visionaries and mavericks who boldly and single-handedly shaped the
ever-sprawling city, ruthlessly attacking all opponents. (Also see "Thinking Big").
And like most articles about Los Angeles, the report takes a slap at Hollywood, crackpot preachers, Forest Lawn, refugees from Iowa and a vain, superficial, suntanned populace that is making its fledgling attempts at culture.

Gen. Harrison Otis is depicted as a cantankerous, eccentric old coot shouting orders as if he were eternally under siege, so forceful a personality that it seems like the entire article is about him, although he constitutes only a third of the story. Harry
Chandler, in contrast, is the shrewd power-broker operating quietly behind the scenes. One
of the most telling quotes is this: 

 

"The difference between Harry and Norman," says one
old-time Angeleno, "is that Harry sat in his office and ruled this city
like a king. Norman doesn’t rule; he isn’t interested in ruling. What
he wants is to become an institution."

Norman Chandler comes off as an unimposing
milquetoast compared to his predecessors and must share the limelight with his wife, Dorothy "Buff" Chandler, portrayed as a terrifying
uber-clubwoman, gadding about the city in her little Simca, meddling in
civic and cultural affairs and nagging her husband to "do
something" about that nasty smog.

If it were no more than this, the story would merely be a dusty curio, worth little more today than the few statistics we can
glean from it. But the parallels between past and present, hidden in
the Time story, are fascinating. Even breathtaking. Beneath the boilerplate
analysis of a crass, frenzied Los Angeles lurks a telling reality:

Compare this, from 1957:

Yet in a town where the Times is
one of the few enduring institutions, Norman Chandler knows better than
to try to wield an overpowering political club. Today’s Los Angeles is
too amorphous for one man to rule, one newspaper to command,* or even
one political organization to anneal.

And this, from a March 26, 2006, article by Peter H. King and Mark Arax:

Those who study Los Angeles today employ terms like "horizontal" and
"diffuse" to describe the city’s power structure. They talk of a power
vacuum and note that, with so many of its old Fortune 500 companies
dissolved, bought up, relocated, Los Angeles has become something of a
"branch city." Whether this represents a good or bad development is
open to interpretation.

"Today there is no single node of power in the city," said Mayor
Antonio Villaraigosa. "It’s diffused geographically, diffused among
important stakeholders — business, labor, for instance — and also
racially and ethnically…. There is a devolution of power today that
is more grass-roots and more focused on specific neighborhoods."

Simply said, the past is far more complicated and layered than we realize and much more like the present than we care to admit. There are no quick descriptions of Los Angeles–and no easy answers–that are of any use; the city is too big and too diverse for a thumbnail sketch. Only the broadest canvas will do and even then the city bleeds over the edges.

I like this final quote from Time:

"Sums up Buffie Chandler: "I don’t say Los Angeles is the most beautiful
place on earth, or even the most desirable. I love San Francisco, for
instance. But I could never live there, because everything that needed
doing has long since been done. In Los Angeles, things will always need
doing, things will always need to be made better. Los Angeles is a
place for the kind of people who are willing to try something new. It’s
a place for people who want to build a new world."

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