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BY AMY LIFSON

California’s Clan

“You don’t use words like loyalty or betrayal when you’re describing Chandlers, any more than you would use them describing wolves or wild dogs. It’s in their nature to eat. They consume.” So says journalist Tim Rutten in a new film chronicling four generations of the Chandler family dynasty in Southern California. Inventing LA airs as a prime time special on PBS, October 5 at 9 p.m.

Beginning with Colonel Harrison Gray Otis, the first publisher of the Los Angeles Times, the family orchestrated the development of modern Los Angeles, using their newspaper to proselytize their vision and politics. Its pages would extol the climate and beauty of the area (and the lack of unions) trying to entice white, middle-class Midwesterners to relocate there. And it worked. In 1882, as the Times first came off the press, Los Angeles was a sleepy town of 12,000; eighteen years later it reached 102,000. According to filmmaker Peter Jones, the largest internal migration in the United States took place when 1.5 million people relocated to Southern California in the 1920s.

A scheme set in motion at the turn of the century made it possible for Los Angeles to grow. Under the direction of Harry Chandler, the Colonel’s protégé and son-in-law, city officials posing as cattle ranchers bought up the water rights from farmers in the Owens Valley, and then built a 233-mile aqueduct to redirect it all towards Los Angeles, an engineering feat that rivaled the water system of the Roman Empire.

“Harry Chandler is a pirate visionary,” says the late journalist David Halberstram in the film. “A man who thought that power was might, who wanted profits and land and his finger in every pie. Who sponsored or founded almost every economic enterprise within his shadow.” He always thought big. Starting out in the circulation department of the paper, Harry bought up all the delivery routes for the Times and its major competitor, the Herald. Then he sent all the Herald’s delivery boys on a five-day vacation to the mountains, while the Times scooped up about half of the neglected subscribers.

The paper was a kingmaker. Staunchly Republican, “it anointed who ran the city, and who ran the state. If you didn’t have the endorsement of the LA Times, you were in big trouble,” explains Jones. According to the film, the Times was responsible for the political success of Richard Nixon in California—endorsing Nixon and relentlessly attacking his opponents as anti-American. When Nixon was accused of having a slush fund, the paper defended him with a front-page editorial. When the Times’s long-time political editor Kyle Palmer died in 1962, Nixon was a pallbearer alongside Norm Chandler, Harry’s son and the paper’s third publisher.

	Otis Chandler, left, with his family, exemplified the California Dream. —Chandler Family Archives

Everything changed when Norm’s son Otis was named publisher in 1960. Otis was in many ways like his mother, Dorothy, the cultural matriarch who saved the Hollywood Bowl and built a world-class performing arts center for the city. Like his mother, Otis’s politics ran more liberal than the rest of the family’s. Also, like his mother, he was despised for stepping out of the conservative Chandler line. Ultimately, it was this family rift that led to the newspaper’s destruction.

Otis “was a character right out of an Ernest Hemingway story, with his hunting, and his surfing, and his car collecting,” says Jones. He was a man of extremes, and he set his goals on transforming the Times from a conservative rag into a first-class paper. In 1958 Time magazine ranked the LA Times as the third worst newspaper in the country; by 1964 it was in the top ten. Under Otis, the Times earned ten Pulitzer Prizes. Despite the paper’s success, there was a dark cloud looming over the golden boy’s head—the entrenched and disapproving family board made up of the rest of the Chandlers. He ridiculed them as “self-indulgent coupon clippers waiting for their next dividend check.”

Otis named Tom Johnson his successor instead of his son Norman. Otis retreated more and more from the daily running of the paper, and in 1985 the family conspired to have him fired as editor in chief and ousted from the board. The decline of the newspaper and the decline of the Chandlers’ power in Los Angeles went hand in hand. Within a decade the Times would go into a downward spiral—falling profits, editorial chaos, and low morale—until it was eventually bought by the Chicago Tribune Co. and filed for bankruptcy in 2008.