79. Forget it, Jake, It's LA
I rode up to USC on Friday by bus and train to hear Bill Boyarsky. He is a 30-year veteran of the Los Angeles Times, a member of multiple Pulitzer Prize-winning teams of reporters, the writer of several books about California politics, and a columnist now for TruthDig.Bill was to talk about his new book and take questions from what is always an idiosyncratic audience "? the members of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities. (I am a member of the LAIH, and both Bill and I are published by Angel City Press in Santa Monica.)
Bill's book is Inventing LA: The Chandlers and their Times, a companion "? but not exactly "? to the new PBS documentary by Peter Jones. Inventing LA: The Chandlers and their Times documentary will be broadcast on KCET on Monday, October 5 at 9:00 p.m.
Bill sketched in his talk the outline of the entangled Times and Chandler family stories: from General Harrison Gray Otis, to his son-in-law Harry Chandler, to his son Norman Chandler, to his son Otis Chandler, and then to Otis Chandler's successor, Tom Johnson.
Bill was blunt about the general and his son-in-law, and truly there's nothing appealing in their part of the story except the exhilaration they both shared in selling Los Angeles into existence between 1880 and 1920. Bill didn't dwell in his talk on handsome, polished, Pasadena-rich Norman Chandler, who oversaw a family business in which the Los Angeles Times was run as just another subsidiary.
Bill lingered on Otis, the last Chandler. Bill knew him as his boss but not particularly well. Otis Chandler was big, athletic, in love with speed, and "? Bill wryly noted "? almost a monster of self-regard. His decision to turn to the paper over to a publisher from outside the family, in part out of self-indulgence "? was as close to classical tragedy as an American story can get.
Otis Chandler made the Los Angeles Times almost great through the 1960s and 1970s, and every fall from that achievement can be threaded back to Otis' decision.
Bill was guarded about the future that the story of the Times and the Chandlers led to. I found the Peter Jones documentary, with its somber music, to be wrenchingly melancholy. But one luncheon guest complained to Bill that this is only the Times, only the Chandlers, only a marginal story far from the places of real significance.
Like clueless Jake Gittes at the end of Chinatown, we're always being ordered to ignore what we need to know best.
The image on this page was made by Flickr user Pieter Edelman. It was used under a Creative Commons license.
