Real Properties, part 7.

Chinatown, or just plain FUBAR and the comeuppance of an idealist.

There is a scene about 40 minutes into the film, Chinatown, that sticks with me for its sheer testosterone-fueled brutality. The scene takes place at night, the time for all things secret and nefarious in this story. The main character, Jake, a PI and ex-cop, has nearly drowned in the supposedly dry spillway at Oak Pass Reservoir. He climbs out over a locked fence, marked ‘no trespassing,’ drenched and grousing. Someone calls out “Hold it there, Kitty-Cat. Hold it!” Jake turns to sees a swaggering guy in a dapper suit, who struts in frame on bouncing legs like he is packing some really big balls. Shambling, unkempt thug Claude Mulvihill steps on a moment later from the right, and you realize Big Balls is really short.

“Hello, Claude. where’d you find the midget?” says Jake. Rapid cut to reverse shot of Big Balls up close, who pops a switch blade up into frame every bit as big as the guy’s nearly bow-legged swagger would suggest. Claude lands a gut punch on Jake and pins him from behind.

“You’re a very nosy fellow, kitty-cat, huh?” says Big Balls, as he moves in close with the knife. “You know what happens to nosy fellows, huh? No? Want to guess? No?” He inserts the tip of the shiny knife up and inside Jake’s left nostril. “Okay.” he says. “They lose their noses!” With that, he splits the nostril all the way up to the bone. Blood splatters. Claude lets go. Jake collapses, groaning.

“Understand? Next time you lose the whole thing. I’ll cut it off and feed it to my goldfish. Understand?”

The character I call Big Balls, the one Jake called the ‘midget,’ was played by none other than the director of the film himself, Roman Polanski, here making his first film since his wife’s murder by the Manson Gang. Critics used to say that Polanski was one of Alfred Hitchcock’s greatest disciples. Hitchcock was famous for his many uncredited cameos, but they were very understated—dare I say, so mid-20^th century British gentleman—compared to what Polanski does here, performing center stage in a sustained and gratuitously violent scene that does nothing to advance the plot. I don’t excuse Polanski’s later sins, but immediately after Sharon Tate’s murder, he was relentlessly targeted as the murderer himself until Manson was caught and the entire Helter-Skelter insanity was exposed. I imagine the experience was both heartbreaking and character curdling.

I think this scene offers a clue about the animus and vision Polanski brought to the making of the film, but screenwriter Robert Towne was angry about something else, the stinky corruption at the heart of LA’s early growth and development. While he cloaks the truth of the real story in myth making, nostalgia, and one particularly nasty character condensation, this part is true of the film, and, slowly in the decades since, the real story: blame can be assigned, even if the perpetrators are never brought to justice. The film ends leaving Jake, the PIs, and the cops—the agents of “Truth, Justice, and the American Way,” as Superman had it—impotent.

None of this was apparent to me as I watched the film in Rochester, NY in 1974. I marveled at all of the exotic glamour of Los Angeles—the Spanish style mansions, the glitter of sunlight on the pair of broken eyeglasses in the koi pond exactly like the pair my Ohio grandad wore, the unaccountable vegetation, even the swayback “flea bitten” gray mare the young boy rode bareback through the riverbed—a rocky, dry, sunblasted riverbed like none other I had ever seen. Even in this silver screen LA, fresh water supplies were inconstant; “it comes and it goes,” says the boy to Jake, which has to be one of the great understatements about water in Southern California.

Chinatown is set in 1938, to judge by Seabiscuit appearing on the Racing Record’s front page in Jake’s lap as he listens to some public debate about funding a (fictional) proposed dam, “The Alto Vallejo,” to store fresh water for parched Los Angeles. The character he has been hired to find dirt on, Hollis Mulwray, is the Water Commissioner of the LA Department of Water and Power, who stands up to remind the public of the recent failure of a similarly designed dam: “In case you have forgotten, gentlemen, over 500 lives were lost when the Van Der Lip Dam gave way.[...] And now you propose another dirt-banked terminus dam[…]. Well, it won’t hold. I won’t build it. It’s that simple. I am not going to make the same mistake twice.”

Hollis Mulwray is Towne’s resurrected version of William Mulholland, (1855-1935), who was the actual Water Commissioner—titles varied: Superintendent, Chief Engineer, etc.—of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power from 1904 until 1928. The second of two dams he designed built to store fresh water in the LA Basin did fail catastrophically but it was not the “Van Der Lip Dam” of Mulwray’s (fictional) hindsight. It was the actual St. Francis Dam, completed in 1928. Its failure occurred within five days of being filled to capacity and created the worst man-made disaster in US history up until then.

Towne was all exercised about the fact that the fresh water stored in the dam was stolen from the Owens River Valley, an entirely unrelated and robust riparian system over 200 miles to the north and east of the Ventura County line—a theft carefully planned and executed by a group of greedy and opportunistic, and otherwise lauded “City Fathers.”

Towne and Polanski’s title, Chinatown, refers both to the part of Los Angeles in which the film’s horrible ending was set, as well as a slang shorthand the film’s PIs and beat cops keep using throughout. By the end of the film, I understood this ‘Chinatown’ to mean much the same as WWII’s wonderful coinage, “FUBAR,” code for “Fucked Up Beyond All Repair,” but with extra points for the added flourish of an ethnic slur. I don’t know if Towne conjured the slur out of whole cloth when he wrote the screenplay, but there are breadcrumbs in Los Angeles history that suggest it, or something like it, might have been a familiar commonplace. (The equally mysterious and questionable “inscrutable Oriental” survived to pepper my childhood in the late 1950s and 60s.)

The first time in American history Los Angeles claimed the national spotlight was in October of 1871, but the story The New York Times covered that year was not some euphoric tale of booster pride or promised Garden of Eden life, and its dateline was Towne’s precise location for all things FUBAR—L.A.s earliest Chinatown. “The Chinese Massacre” was five racist, drunken, vengeful hours that resulted in the murders of nineteen Chinese men and boys, twelve of them by public lynching in front of what is today’s Union Station. Of course The Chinese Exclusion act was enshrined in federal law during the next decade, so this particular prejudice was not unique to Southern California.

The true story of the damn disaster that Towne’s screenplay both draws from and disguises beyond all recognition began when Pasadena blueblood Frederick Eaton was elected mayor of Los Angeles in 1898, having campaigned on a promise of expanding the growing city’s fresh water supply. Eaton had been the head of the existing Los Angeles City Water Company (LACWC) and left it in the capable hands of his protégé, William Mulholland, when he took office.

Eaton and an independent engineering consultant in Los Angeles, Joseph Lippincott, had been puzzling over the problem posed by the LA area’s attractive development potential and its limitation—enough fresh water. After crawling all over the state, they decided that the nearest ample fresh water source for LA was 200 miles north, in the form of the Owens River on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada.

Both men understood that if they could capture the rights to that water, piping it to LA was, topographically speaking, all downhill. In 1902, Lippincott was hired by Theodore Roosevelt’s newly formed US Reclamation Service to oversee water projects in California. First up was a project in the Owens River Valley initially tasked with storing and distributing the massive spring Sierra snow melt for the benefit of the ranchers and residents of the area. Lippincott took the job but refused to give up his lucrative consulting business; Roosevelt either couldn’t or wouldn’t pay him enough to ensure he had no conflict of interest. Maybe he didn’t care.

Eaton, out of office by 1904, began personally acquiring land and purchase options along the riparian corridors of the Owens Valley. When asked by local ranchers what he was up to, he said he was thinking about retiring there. At other times, he claimed to be working for Lippincott and the Reclamation Service. Eaton and Lippincott convinced Mulholland that the Owens River was the right answer to LA’s water problems, but I also suspect the whole scheme was such a monumental engineering puzzle that he just couldn’t resist. Harrison Gray Otis, the publisher of the LA Times, was next. Mulholland and Eaton went to work on engineering the plans while Otis began to imagine the fortune to be made in worthless San Fernando Valley grazing land if Eaton’s pipe dream were to deliver the water right there, thirty miles north of the city. Otis brought his son-in-law Harry Chandler in on the scheme. Together they assembled a who’s-who of moneyed LA movers and shakers—Railroad magnate Henry E. Huntington, and “Father of Glendale” Leslie Brand, among others—and bought thousands of acres of dry chapparal roughly where the city of Northridge in the San Fernando Valley now sits. The “Doing Business As” name they chose was “The San Fernando Mission Land Company.” Ca-Ching! By the way, Towne’s screenplay condenses this entire group of greed fueled predators into one truly evil character in the film, millionaire property speculator, murderer and incestuous pedophile, Noah Cross, played to devastating effect by another famous director, John Huston.

Otis’s LA Times started a drum beat in 1903 about the city’s DIRE DROUGHT in large point type. In time with the beat, Mulholland secretly dumped fresh water into the Pacific at night. For most of the next two years the drought and the problem of LA’s fresh water supply was constantly in the news. In 1905, a bunch of Mulholland’s agents visited the Owens Valley. Posing as ranchers they began to exercise all the purchase options Eaton had so quietly put in place. That July, the LA Times shouted from the front page: “TITANIC PROJECT TO GIVE CITY A RIVER.” No one was more surprised than the Owens Valley farmers. There are some reports that Roosevelt privately expressed support for Team Eaton’s coup—but moved by the protests, Roosevelt appointed a special investigator to examine how all this had happened on Lippincott’s watch. Lippincott did not pass the smell test, nor did the City of LA, but nothing came of it because LA had scooped (to use a metaphor Otis would recognize) both the riparian rights and the land in question.

Construction of the aqueduct, the power plants, and the reservoirs began in the fall of 1908. The first water was released at the top of the San Fernando Valley north of LA in November of 1913. Mulholland famously and simply said at the opening ceremony:

“There it is—take it.”

He might have been speaking of both the Owens River and the vast San Fernando Valley, the same suburban grid Bing Crosby would famously sing about in 1944: “…I'm gonna settle down and never more roam / And make the San Fernando Valley my home.” By then the San Fernando Mission Land Company investors had long been laughing all the way to the bank. By 1915, Los Angeles annexed the valley, expanding the city’s tax base and conveniently covering the remaining cost of constructing the aqueduct.

Mulholland’s engineering genius was lauded across the country. He went on to work on many other municipal and federal water projects, including the Hoover Dam. But while waving his magic water wand over the Colorado River, he was bothered that his rapidly growing LA was still water insecure, so he undertook to provide a “rainy-day” cache of water for the city. Following the design of his previously built Hollywood Dam and reservoir, he constructed the St. Francis Dam to store more of the filched Owens River in a canyon adjacent to today’s Santa Clarita and squarely within the Santa Clara River watershed.

The bridge I am standing on in the first photo of this chapter is a material footnote to the story. That bridge is from the late fifties, and continues to be an adequate replacement for Santa Paula’s first motorized-vehicle bridge, built in 1919, that linked the oil fields and farmland on the south side of the Santa Clara to the rail head to the north. Its first incarnation was wiped out in Mullholland’s flood, which released a forty foot wall of water moving 15-20 mph down the Santa Clara River bottom through Ventura County in the middle of an otherwise calm March night in 1928.

Ventura County’s death toll has never been finalized. They had names for around 450 people, but that comes nowhere near accounting for all the missing—random visitors, seasonal workers, squatters, and other unknowns, not to mention habitat, wildlife, livestock, orchards, houses, and topsoil. In his defense, Mulholland did not have the technology to detect the geologic instability in the eastern abutment the canyon where he sited the dam. The odium attached to the staggering loss of life and property in the Heritage Valley lead to Mulholland’s immediate resignation and by all accounts destroyed Mulholland personally. He died in 1935, three years before the film’s version of this tale is set.

After the mud settled—and the lawsuits—Los Angeles in effect turned its back on Ventura County for the remainder of the 20th century. Ventura County has stayed agricultural and slow growth, with a current population of less than one million. Los Angeles County and its metropolitan sprawl is home to twenty million souls and growing.

The Owens Valley has persistent grievances for its brutal riparian rape by LA’s Department of Water and Power, which is still the largest landowner in the area. Those grievances have partially and only environmentally mitigated. LA has ceded none of the water. The only successful challenges have been since the 1970 passage of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), recently extensively amended by Governor Gavin Newsom in the interest of much needed housing development across the state. So here the problem of all these stories is in the news again: the toxic nexus between property development pressure and sensitive environmental quality management.

Since Y2K, The Nature Conservancy (TNC), the largest private land conservancy in the world, has bought, traded, or been gifted over four thousand acres of the river bottom in Ventura County, including forty-seven acres from what is now Deep End Ranch, with the intent to rehabilitate this rare riparian survivor and to try to mitigate the oncoming effects of climate change. This is a fragile area, and like everywhere else, the weather is only going to get stormier.

Living here, two miles downstream from that bridge I was shaken up on, our house is close enough to the riverbank to catch the water glinting through the orchards. Converse’s lovely old farmhouse sits about fifty feet above the flood plain. The City of Santa Paula, which sits on the bank opposite us, has an even lower elevation, and was therefore, I thought rather smugly, more at risk.

Like Noah Cross, my narrow binocular vision marks me too as a predator—single minded and forward focused. Equine vision—a 350-degree primarily monocular point of view—includes seeing themselves and their entire bodies amongst and with all the other bodies around them. My precious time learning from horses has convinced me that my self-centered opportunism, my me-first-ism, is probably a predator adaptation hard-wired into the most ancient parts of my lizard brain. This evolutionary point of view is, I believe, at the heart of human-centered climate change, and the autocracies of greed we are reaping now.

The Santa Clara scours away this valley, undercutting and washing away acres and acres of its mountains each time. The fifty-foot-high bench where my house, Converse’s house, sits—the one I felt so smug about—was once just another riverbank left behind as the river changed course and flowed off to scour some other part of its valley for a while. Some year, the river may crook its little finger to claim this fragile high ground right out from under us, and all these little buildings Edmond Converse built out of sticks and stones will thrash about in the mud too, in spite of all my predator illusions about property or permanence.

The mountain above us is as delicate as sugar and as dry as salt. The river below is shallow and passive, except when the heavens open, or the gates of some bone-headed human-made hell. Sugar Mountain spoons the Santa Clara in an ancient and stormy romance. We only shelter here.

Oh, by the way, back in LA County, Newhall Land and Farming was bought out by the developer, Lennar Homes and rebranded under a new self-fashioning, “Newhall Land.” As I write these words, Lennar is building Santa Clarita’s twin city and next-door neighbor, a development that will fill all the remaining open land along the Santa Clara River right up to where it escapes across the Ventura County line. This planned city is called, in the sad confluence of history-lite and corporate branding, “Newhall Ranch.” They did not have sufficient fresh water supplies for the projected population of this new city, according to the last Environmental Quality Report filed with the state under the old CEQA requirements.

This concludes the second chapter, dear reader. Thank you for following along as I nailed these words to the page. I will take a brief break from posting new material here to finally build and launch a website where all of these missives will be polished and assembled chapter by chapter.. Stay tuned. I will start posting again in September with the opening of the third chapter of Lemon Weather: “Farming.”