Sorry, Jake, it's Chandlertown
One phone call from L.A.'s patriarch, and a story vanishes. Coincidence? Not bloody likely.
By MARK DOWIE
every now and then plutocrats expose themselves in strange ways and places. And the September issue of Vanity Fair offers readers a particularly lurid glimpse of the private parts of power. In a profile of himself in that issue, Otis Chandler, the aging patriarch of L.A.'s last gentile dynasty, quite casually boasts of arranging the execution of a forthcoming article about his family in Los Angeles magazine, a property that Disney had recently acquired along with ABC and everything else that Cap Cities Corporation had owned.
"I spoke to Mike Eisner," Chandler told reporter David Margolick within minutes after they had met, "and said, 'Do you realize that you're going to do another -- another -- piece on the Chandlers?'... "He [Eisner] said, 'Don't see why,' and that was the end of it."
Within days of the phone call the story was killed. LA's new editor Michael Caruso, imported by Disney from New York, told his editors that it "just didn't fit" in the magazine he envisioned. And quite cordially, he killed the piece.
Caruso flatly denies that he came to Los Angeles with marching orders from Michael Eisner or anyone else at Disney. "To Eisner's credit, he didn't make a phone call," Caruso says. Criticizing the journalistic ethics of Vanity Fair and Margolick, whom he says "never called me," Caruso adds, "I didn't hear a word from anyone at Disney for two or three months after I arrived."
As author of the article in question, I was naturally heartened to learn, eight months after it was killed, that perhaps it had not, as I had truly believed, been rejected solely for lack of merit. And of course I was flattered that Otis Chandler, patriarch of the oldest and arguably most powerful WASP family in Los Angeles, had found my inquiries so threatening that he took the time to call Michael Eisner -- not an easy man to reach by phone -- and request such a humiliating favor.
But I was baffled by Chandler's whining over "another piece" on the family, because Los Angeles has barely published a word about his kin over the past decade. The Chandlers are a banal lot that shy away from media attention, even their own media. In fact, the most recent substantive mention was in one of those trite most-powerful-citizens-of-the-city lists, published in the late 1980s, in which Chandler was ranked number one -- more potent, said Los Angeles, than Lew Wasserman, Tom Bradley or Michael Eisner. And who could complain about that?
What is also strange about Chandler's eagerness to protect his family is that, in the interview for Vanity Fair, he trashes one member after another of his clan -- even, to the certain horror of those who know and love her, his own doting, invalid mother, Dorothy "Buff" Chandler, who clearly made Otis the surprising success that he became. "Let's talk about what my mother did and what she didn't do but says she did," Chandler says to Margolick, before clearing the record on the grand dame's history. It's a good thing Buff can't read. That remark alone would have earned Otis a good spanking.
I was far kinder to Buff. In fact, I found her to be the only Chandler of more than 250 on the tree that seemed to have any integrity or imagination. Most of the others, as Otis attests, are right-wing coupon clippers living in the 19th century. Otis is also harder on his cousins and in-laws than I was -- at least in some respects. He calls them liars, I quoted them lying. He mentions their cupidity, I documented it -- four generations of it -- culminated by a tawdry attempt, in which Otis was complicit, to enrich the family by cutting ordinary shareholders out of the lucrative sale of Times Mirror's $2.3 billion cable company to Cox Broadcasting.
So why was he so intent upon killing the LA magazine story? He knew what I was pursuing. Times Mirror's overworked flack Martha Goldstein kept him abreast of that. She told him I was snuffing around the voluminous Chandler court records, where he knew I would find avaricious probate challenges and the sordid divorce proceedings between his son Michael and Michael's first wife Mary. Everyone in the immediate family hung up when I asked about that one, except Mary, who is raising three young Chandlers while working as a hairdresser in Durango, Colorado. All she is asking is that the children, who DNA tests show are Michael's, be included in the Chandler trusts with the rest of their cousins -- a little help with education and orthodonture.
Of course, no man who bench-presses 250 pounds, can throw a shot-put over 70 feet and shoots polar bears for thrills likes to be reminded that it was his mother's persistent lobbying that got him the top job at the family newspaper. And enough had been said about the time a young man with a nine-figure net worth acted as a shill for a larcenous San Francisco stockbroker and hunting pal named Jack Burke, in return for finder's fees, a Mercury station wagon, credit cards and free shares of an oil exploration company called Geotek. These are things worth forgetting, particularly if their suppression is only a phone call away.
But what surprises me most, I suppose, is the casual reception Chandler's demonstration of plutocratic bravado has received in the media. Am I naive to find it unusual for a rich and powerful person to erase ink about themselves with a single phone call? I've heard stories, of course, but wrote them off as conspiracy theories. Here before me is evidence that one of my favorite subjects actually placed the call, and openly bragged about its effectiveness. I have to wonder how many people called Otis Chandler, who claims to have fought so hard to preserve the independence of his editors and reporters during his 20-year reign as publisher of the Los Angeles Times, and stopped embarrassing stories about themselves?
My respect for the man is tempered. And my naivete has vanished.
Mark Dowie's book "Losing Ground" was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.