A Bright and Guilty Place: Murder, Corruption, and L.A.'s Scandalous Coming of Age (26 page)

29

Sad Song

I
think that Dave Clark’s head has been turned by adulation and ambition. He has a handsome face and a fine physique but I’m afraid that he has lost his soul,” Joe Ford had said, and many had assumed this was rhetoric, a prosecutor laying it on thick in the hope of securing a verdict. How could a jury look into the coolness of Dave Clark’s eyes and pronounce that he had lost or killed something inside? A soul is an amorphous concept, and people can rush on without one. Having been acquitted, Clark left the firm of Wellborn, Wellborn & Wellborn, and set up his own legal practice. His primary client was his friend Guy McAfee, the gambling lord; Clark became a gangland lawyer, and was paid well for it, though he spent whatever he earned. He was reckless with money, as always. Toward the end of March 1933, Nancy Clark was about to board an El Paso–bound train, planning to cross from Texas into Mexico to obtain a quicky divorce from her husband. In the art-deco hall of L.A.’s Union Station, with the ticket in her hand, she changed her mind, turning on her heel to return home to their new and bigger house at 554 Moreno Drive. “I just talked with Dave and we’ve decided we could never, never separate. We love each other too much,” she told a reporter from the Times. “There will be no divorce. It was just a little family spat—I have a temper and that is the trouble.”

Clark was on the front pages again in January 1937 when he left for San Francisco, telling Nancy that he was involved in a big deal, and disappeared. “Dave Clark vanished as completely as if he had been swallowed up by the earth beneath him,” wrote Liberty magazine. Days went by, and Nancy was hysterical, afraid that Dave had been kidnapped and killed for the large sum of cash he’d been carrying with him—about $5,000. After several weeks, with no money to pay the bills, Nancy started selling the furniture and placed their latest new home, an even grander residence at 131 S. Rossmore Avenue, up for sale. On March 15 a headline appeared on the front page of the New York Times: “MISSING AMERICAN FOUND.” Dave Clark was in Nice, France, having checked into an expensive hotel carrying nothing but a cane and “without so much as a five centime piece in his pocket.” The American Consul in Nice, Richard Hull, was notified, and word was sent to Nancy.

Clark told the story of his wanderings to a Los Angeles reporter. He’d visited the areas of France where he’d served in WWI, but had found everything changed. “Things aren’t the same now,” he said. He’d traveled through Italy, following a route that he and Nancy had once taken in happier days, and had left his bags at the Hotel Excelsior in San Remo, where they had stayed together. “I’ve been here in Nice for about a month. And I am broke,” he said. “There was no trouble at home that caused me to leave. At least it wasn’t real trouble. I had a lot of debts and too many things to think about and I guess I just went screwy. I guess I have just been plain crazy.”

He sent word to Nancy. “She’s the only woman in the world I have ever loved. I want her to know that I could never love anyone else,” he said.

Richard Hull, the consul, said Clark had told him “he was insane and without the courage to commit suicide.”

“I’d sell my last ring and go to him in burlap if necessary,” Nancy told a reporter, trying to figure how to bring her husband home. Guy McAfee took care of that, wiring Clark $600 for a ticket, and Clark arrived back in New York aboard the American Export liner Excalibur on April 2, 1937, “well-dressed and in an amiable mood,” according to the New York Times. He left the downtown pier where the liner docked and asked a cabbie the fare to the Commodore Hotel in mid-town Manhattan. Not having the money, he took the subway instead.

Five months later, it was Nancy’s turn to make the headlines. “WIFE OF D. H. CLARK, EX-PROSECUTOR OF LOS ANGELES, IS RELEASED AFTER NIGHT IN LOCK-UP,” said the New York Times on November 27, 1937. Nancy, unable to pay her hotel bill, had been arrested; she was forced to sell her mink coat, valued by detectives at $3,000 or more, to raise the money. By then she and Dave were separated, and she was living in an apartment in Hollywood. She’d followed her husband to New York, however, registering at a Lexington Avenue hotel under the name Mrs. Natalie Crane. She secured her release from jail quickly enough, but by now the marriage was over. Nancy finally divorced her husband in Reno on July 10, 1939, on grounds of desertion. Clark’s annual income at that time was $52,000. Within days he was remarried, in Tijuana, to a wealthy divorcee and society figure, Mrs. Richmond Edwards, formerly Dorothea Jump, daughter of Jimmy Jump, the millionaire and record-holding sports fisherman who had befriended the Clarks on Catalina Island all those years before. The newlyweds honeymooned on The Lively Lady, a yacht that Clark now owned. During the course of the war years, Dave and Dorothea had three children; but she divorced him on February 1, 1946, in Reno, charging that he spent too much on booze and often left her alone. She married him again on March 3, 1946, in Yuma, Arizona, and divorced him for the second and final time on September 17, 1947. This rollercoaster ride of a relationship suggested something of the passion and chaos that the suave Clark created around himself. He had power over women, but never enough control of himself.

Clark’s life spiraled downward. His friend and patron Guy McAfee, run out of Los Angeles at last, had decamped to Nevada, where in 1938 he opened a gambling club on Highway 91, a few miles short of Las Vegas. Recalling L.A.’s Sunset Strip, McAfee named the highway in front of his joint “The Strip.” “McAfee stumbled into history,” notes the writer David Thomson.

Clark’s law practice foundered and for a while he lived obscurely as the operator of a small store near Costa Mesa—the days of the yachts long gone—and he often drifted down into Mexico, driving about. Some friends remained loyal, however, and he was taken in by George Blair, another lawyer, a colleague from USC in the early 1920s. Clark stayed with Blair and his wife Rose “Toots” Blair through the summer and fall of 1953. On Armistice Day, November 11, there was a family party. After the guests had departed, George Blair, drunk, passed out on the sofa. “I heard a kind of explosion, like a backfire. I didn’t get up, not right at first. I lay there some little time,” Blair said later. “Then I kind of sat up and looked around the room. Dave was sitting there in a chair.

“I said to him, ‘Where’s Toots?’ He looked at me then. He said, ‘I killed her.’”

Blair found his wife in the kitchen, lying on the step, dead in a pool of blood with her shoulder blown off and the door blown open. Clark had killed her with a shotgun after an argument about him “mooching” on the family. So he went on trial for murder for the third time in his life.

Before the trial began, though, Nancy Clark, going by her maiden name of Nancy Malone, died of a broken heart in her Los Angeles apartment on New Year’s Day. She’d never remarried, and was buried in Calvary Cemetery on Whittier Boulevard in East Los Angeles. Dave Clark changed his not-guilty plea to that of guilty of murder in the second degree, and on January 30 was given a sentence of five years to life. He would serve less than three weeks. In Chino Prison he suffered a brain hemorrhage and died on February 20, 1954.

So concluded the story of Dave Clark and Nancy Malone, bound together in death as they had been in life, like characters in a tragic and romantic ballad. She left him and never stopped loving him while each day ruing the fact that they’d ever met. The murder of Rose “Toots” Blair threw a backward light on the shootings of Crawford and Spencer, and though what precisely had happened in the iron-shuttered star chamber of 6665 Sunset Boulevard would still never be established, it was impossible now for anybody to believe in Clark’s blamelessness and innocence. Perhaps that’s what broke Nancy in the end. She knew she could no longer pretend to accept the lie. Dave was a killer, a once upright, brave, and hopeful young man who went bad, drawn into the rackets and unable to control the self-destructive sexual drive or murderous rages he was slick enough to cover up only after the event.

30

Lives Go On

L
ucien Wheeler, the capable Notre Dame graduate, presidential bodyguard, FBI man, private eye, and short-lived head of the D.A.’s investigative unit, headed up the West Coast office of OSS, forerunner of the CIA, during WWII. He died in 1950 and his grandchildren are active in political life today. Blayney Matthews quit the D.A.’s office and was, for more than twenty years, the head of security at Warner Bros. No doubt he knew where plenty of bodies were buried.

C. C. Julian, the pied piper of Julian Pete, died of a drug overdose presumed a suicide at a Shanghai Hotel in 1934; he received a pauper’s funeral. For years people chased Jake Berman (aka Jake Bennett) and the loot he’d stashed in banks around the world, but both money and the “two-name man” contrived to elude pursuers.

E. L. Doheny died on September 8, 1935, never having recovered from the stroke that struck him soon after his final acquittal. His wife Estelle buried him, not with his son Ned and his first wife Carrie in Forest Lawn, but in another family mausoleum at Calvary Cemetery in East L.A. As it happened, Nancy Clark would be laid to rest nearby eighteen years later. Nancy’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren, the descendants of the daughter she brought with her when she married Dave Clark, remember her with fondness.

Examiner
reporter Morris Lavine wrote a novel while he was in jail, and on his release campaigned for the governor’s pardon. He got one, and became a celebrated attorney, fighting cases to the Supreme Court and living into his eighties. When he died, his daughter took over the firm he’d created. “There was a lot more to my dad than the melee over the $75,000,” she told me.

Gene Coughlin lived a long life of writing and reporting, a newsman of the old school. The Reverend Bob Shuler lost his radio station and his magazine, lost a tumultuous campaign in which he ran for California senator, lost much of his power and vanished from the big public stage; but he went on pounding away from the pulpit. The Reverend Gustav Briegleb became a private eye for a while, but then he too returned to preaching. W. I. Gilbert died suddenly in 1941, while still one of the city’s most sought-after defense attorneys.

In 1937 Buron Fitts was wounded by a volley of shots while leaving his home—another episode in the struggle for control of the Los Angeles underworld. Fitts reached a troubled accommodation with the regime of Mayor Frank Shaw, holding onto his position as D.A. when Shaw was booted out in 1938. In 1940, though, Fitts failed in his bid for yet another term. He rejoined the Army with the rank of major, and in WWII served with distinction in North Africa, Europe, and the Pacific. In 1973, old and infirm, he put a handgun to his head and pulled the trigger, killing himself.

Clara Bow’s attempts at a comeback failed. She married her boyfriend Rex Bell and had children with him, but suffered numerous nervous breakdowns. She died in 1965, just as a new generation of critics started looking at silent films and got ready to champion the importance of her career. “It was people like Clara Bow who taught cameras how lucky they were,” writes David Thomson in A Biographical Dictionary of Film.

Guy McAfee prospered in Las Vegas, where historians tend to ignore him in favor of more glamorous figures like Bugsy Siegel. But then nobody ever shot McAfee in the eye with a rifle. He died, old and rich and apparently happy, in his bed, while still a large shareholder in The Golden Nugget and The Last Frontier, two of the casinos he’d founded.

Raymond Chandler was seventy years old when he died in 1959. By then he’d been living for years in La Jolla, north of San Diego, having finally been exhausted by the city whose bard he remains. His detective Marlowe is always getting drugged or smacked on the head, blackouts and amnesia being standard plot devices in Chandler’s work. In a similar way, noir film and fiction have become, for Los Angeles, forms of forgetting, a system of lenses through which the city has chosen to observe—and often distort—its past. People tend to take their water history from
Chinatown
, and the Black Dahlia murder is known primarily through the fictive product of John Gregory Dunne and James Ellroy. The history of the bombing of the Times building in 1910, as yet unfilmed and the subject of few books, is scarcely known at all; the Greystone tragedy is seen in fragments, in biographies of E. L. Doheny or studies of Teapot Dome; and Chandler’s prose is often recommended as the best source for getting a sense of what L.A. actually feels like, even today.

The external fabric of Los Angeles—its buildings and how they look—is in a constant state of flux and evolution, hence the city’s value and reputation as a playground for architects. But while much does feel new—and always somehow temporary and insubstantial in the too-bright light, as Scott Fitzgerald said all those years ago—the barnacles and growing residue of history have become harder to ignore, even here where history tends to mean the history of forgetting and rewriting.

Greystone itself, still situated on Loma Vista Drive in Los Angeles, was far too extravagant a production to be knocked down or monkeyed with in any substantial way. Lucy, Ned Doheny’s widow, remarried and raised their five children in the house, choosing to live with the phantoms. When the family was raised and the Dohenys had left, Greystone was bought by the City of Beverly Hills in 1964. The mansion features as a location in many movies, including The Witches of Eastwick, The Big Lebowski, Attack from Mars, and most recently, There Will Be Blood, loosely based on Upton Sinclair’s 1925 novel Oil!, and so remains connected to the Doheny story in more ways than one. The events of the night of February 16–17, 1929, provide one of L.A.’s central mysteries—typical in being only vaguely remembered and a metaphor for power’s secret reach and power’s ultimate futility. Leslie White had entered the majestic hallway at Greystone with understandable trepidation, daunted by the splendor of the furnishings and the vaulting height of the leaded windows, which today provide the same stunning views, albeit of a transformed city. The silence, when the heavy doors shut in that hallway, is still striking. Greystone is a haunted time capsule, magnificent but mad and melancholy, imbued with the dark past of the city whose destiny E. L. Doheny transformed with a pick and shovel.

Charlie Crawford’s lair at 6665 Sunset Boulevard is now a sex shop (he’d have no doubt smiled at that), but his grand Beverly Hills villa stands and is the residence of a successful movie producer. Sunset Boulevard—along which Dave Clark fled in his yellow Ford Roadster—is still a long and curving road, both immensely dangerous and immensely romantic, flanked by swank homes as it sweeps ocean-ward. Downtown, many of the movie theaters and huge numbers of office buildings that shot up in the 1920s are still there, though shabbier now and featuring street-level storefronts with signs in Spanish or Chinese or Korean—fine buildings in their way and surprisingly solid, by no means ghosts. The neighborhood is in the midst of a “revival,” a contemporary booster ploy, and some grand structures get new lives as lofts, galleries, restaurants.

The gray granite Hall of Justice has been empty for years. It suffered damage in the Northridge earthquake of 1994, the same tremor that my then bungalow home survived by wafting its flimsy walls in rhythm to the movement of the earth. The Hall of Justice is boarded up and fenced off, dwarfed on two sides by newer and taller buildings, awaiting rehabilitation like a forgotten prisoner.

Leslie White kept going, undaunted and indomitable, an oddball who, once he got into stuff, went all the way. In the late 1930s, inspired by the example of Lincoln Steffens, White started a muckraking magazine, Focus, and was soon in trouble for publishing his crime-scene photographs of the corpses at Greystone. He went on selling crime stories to the pulps and to Hollywood, though his writing career fizzled for a time at the outset of WWII. By the end of the war, however, he had met Helen, who would become his third wife, while driving a cab through the streets of Los Angeles. Together they sailed a boat around America to the East Coast where they bought a small farm in Virginia. White raised herds of Aberdeen Angus and became president of the local beef cattle association and of the local farm bureau. Occasionally, on a summer night, he would gather his children on the porch in the dark and tell stories. “It wasn’t a nightly or a weekly occurrence, but he was a fabulous vocal storyteller,” his daughter told me. “He was quite a reticent man. But even at the end of his life he was bothered by what he’d seen in the flood after the dam burst.”

White was also president of the National Model Railroad Association, and his family have kept his original model train layout in the barn where he made it. Through the late 1940s and 1950s he published another string of books, historical novels this time, with titles like Lord Johnnie, Sir Rogue, The Highland Hawk, and His Majesty’s Highlanders. He wrote about loners and rebels and heroes who went their own way. He never lost his knack for a yarn, and toward the end of his life recalled his pulp days by binding up in leather some of his early stories. On the spine of these self-published volumes, in gilt, are the words: “LESLIE WHITE, DETECTIVE, WRITER.”

Leslie White came to L.A. and managed to get away. Dave Clark was born here and never escaped. The stories of both men are emblematic of the city and the fates that touch human aspiration. The one man speaks of hope and luck, the other portrays doom. White worked with the D.A.’s office for a little more than two years, an action-packed period that was never repeated in his life. The events he witnessed neither tortured nor twisted him; rather they changed him and allowed him to grow. Dave Clark, meanwhile, was drawn in deep and became a noir movie before the genre existed; his real-life story, an intense drama of failed promise, seems predictive. He lived for the moment and was killed by his past.

Dave Clark got away with things for years, while a moral and spiritual bleakness slowly possessed him. He didn’t look well when he walked into court for that last time, to face the charge of murdering Rose “Toots” Blair. He looked like a shadow of his former self, a broken man, his characteristic swagger that had bordered on arrogance reduced to an apologetic shuffle, his gorgeous clothes replaced by an ill-fitting sportscoat. But reporters noted how he regained himself as proceedings got under way. His back straightened, he drew himself upright, and he changed his plea to “guilty” with composure and dignity. Trials were Dave Clark’s stage, theaters where he’d known triumph. Like L.A. itself, even when he was howling inside, he never quite lost his glamor.