A Bright and Guilty Place Page 8

  If you could get inside … In Mexico, Doheny had hired an army to protect an entire region against insurgents and unpredictable revolution. In Los Angeles, he turned the family homes into fortresses. “Beverly Hills residents came to regard Greystone as a self-contained principality,” writes Margaret Leslie Davis. “The estate had its own gatekeepers, watchmen, mechanics, house staff, field crews, and even its own fire station. A neo-Gothic garage, which housed ten of Ned and Lucy’s cars, featured its own gas pumps, lifts, and machine shops. Among the staff were cooks, housemaids, a kitchen maid, laundresses, a maintenance worker, a painter, ten gardeners, four chauffeurs, and two operators who ran Ned’s two telephone switchboards.”

  Among the staff … Even the wealthiest can’t work or live alone—not if they wish (like the Dohenys did) to live with style and show. Cocoons are really only effective for the recluse. For a while Doheny Sr. employed as one of his private secretaries a smart, educated young woman named Miriam Lerner, the daughter of a department-store owner, a girl from a good family. No doubt the fact that she was gorgeous helped too. Lerner was a mistress of the photographer Edward Weston, and became the subject for some of his most famous nude studies. Among Lerner’s other lovers was a young artist and beginning screenwriter, John Huston. In the early 1930s, while living in the South of France, she helped Emma Goldman write her autobiography. At this time, in the late 1920s, she turned her Los Feliz house into a salon for writers, artists, bohemians, whose money problems she soothed by fixing cushy jobs with the Dohenys. Thus, the future bookdealer Jake Zeitlin trimmed the Greystone lawns, and for a while Louis Adamic had jockeyed gas from a Greystone pump.

  All this was innocent; and perhaps Doheny knew of, and smiled at, the game beautiful Miriam Lerner was playing. But the urge for self-containment and self-protection sometimes has ironic, unforeseeable consequences. Even if you build a fairy-tale palace with, as Margaret Davis notes, “a gift room where Lucy Doheny could wrap fabulous presents for her family, friends, and staff at Christmas time,” you still live with whatever perhaps not-so-fabulous gifts that are unknowingly seeded within. Much can be controlled by money, but not everything—not even by $300 million. E. L. Doheny discovered this on that fateful night in February 1929—for his son was killed by a member of his staff, a trusted and put-upon servant.

  “With the accelerator squeezed against the floor boards, I raced my car through the semi-deserted streets of Hollywood and Beverly Hills to the palatial Doheny mansion on Doheny Drive,” wrote Leslie White. To his amazement he found the estate surrounded—not by the police but by private detectives, another of Doheny’s armies. A Times photo taken later that morning shows the men still in place around Greystone, toting pistols and shotguns.

  “It would be simpler to crash Buckingham Palace,” wrote White, making the joke that Chandler would later tweak and polish. Three of the guards stopped White at the gatehouse, barring his entry until word came down and they waved him on. “I drove up to the house and was admitted by one of those frozen-faced butlers, properly and immaculately garbed despite the hour and the tragedy.”

  Once inside White set down his camera and equipment for a moment, took off his spectacles and polished them. He was struck by the silence as Greystone’s hushed solid-stone splendor heightened the weird reality, almost surreality, that attends murder’s official aftermath. Whole teams of law enforcement spoke to each other in whispers. This, as it happened, was the first murder the newly formed Beverly Hills Police Department had faced, though neither the Beverly Hills cops nor the L.A. County Sheriffs’ Department deputies, who were also there, showed any desire to claim jurisdiction over a case that was clearly explosive and filled with career-ending potential. So the D.A.’s office had taken over, in the commanding shape of Lucien Wheeler.

  While at Notre Dame, Lucien Wheeler had been on the rowing crew and had played in the brass band. He was a handsome, powerful man of medium height. He had large, shrewd eyes, a small mouth, and huge skills. As head of the U.S. Secret Service’s presidential guard, he’d ridden on the running boards of automobiles, keeping a watchful eye for anybody who might step out of a crowd and try to assassinate Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. He’d visited Los Angeles as early as 1911, as the advance man for President Taft, meeting the railroad people, the police, the organizers of the parades, and the managers and bellboys of the hotels where the president would stay. He arranged the guards and plotted the routes and the guest lists. In 1929, at age fifty-three, this subtle and unflappable man was the most experienced and accomplished law enforcement guy in L.A. The brash young Leslie White was a little in awe of Lucien Wheeler.

  “He met me in Greystone’s huge hallway and calmly briefed me,” White wrote. “He told me to do my work and report back only to him.”

  White, small and intrepid, lugged his gear down a long, dim corridor, and went through a door into a guest suite. On the floor he saw not one corpse, but two. “They were just as dead as any of the score or more ‘bindle-stiffs’ I had found in the jungles,” White wrote. He used the term “bindle-stiff,” slang for the victim of a drug overdose, to give the impression that he’d seen scores of corpses, and he had; nonetheless, beneath the tough-guy pose, he was shaken. Here was violent death, frightening and intimate. “In a luxurious bedroom lay the corpse of Doheny, clad only in his underwear and a silk bathrobe. There was a hole through his skull from ear to ear and he lay on his back. Blood was crisscrossed in a crazy pattern over his finely chiseled face.”

  White set about his work.

  The second corpse was that of Hugh Plunkett, Ned Doheny’s secretary. Spread-eagled on his stomach, Plunkett lay face down in a pool of blood that welled from a hole in his head. His brains had spattered the wall, and the rug at his feet had been shoved sideways as he fell. His right arm was stretched out, empty; the fingers of the left hand, lying at his side, had been burned by the half-smoked cigarette they still held.

  White wondered about the cigarette, the first of a number of details he would find strange. He located the bullet that had passed through Ned Doheny’s brain. It was buried in an exterior wall at a height of six feet. Carefully, with tweezers and the blade of a penknife, he eased the bullet out of the flaking plaster and dropped it in an envelope. He fingerprinted both men, taking their lifeless hands in his own, rolling the finger and thumb ends on an ink pad, and pressing them against paper. He lifted Plunkett’s body and found a still-warm gun, a Bisley .45 Colt revolver. He wrapped it in a cloth, planning to take prints from it later.

  With his camera and flashgun, White took crime scene photographs that have lost none of their power. They show an expensively furnished room with Ned Doheny lying in a pool of his own blood next to an overturned chair. Drying blood covers his face like a mask and his bare feet are tucked into shiny leather slippers. An unlit cigarette lies at his fingertips. A glass tumbler, unbroken, has fallen to the floor. An opened bottle of Johnnie Walker is on a table. Plunkett, dressed in a pinstripe suit, is in the background, prone in a doorway. He, too, lies in blood. The two men are close, as they had been for years, yet separated by a crucial distance.

  Ned Doheny had a life of privilege from the start, very different from Plunkett’s. From the storybook frontier uncertainty of his own father’s, Ned grew up rich in Los Angeles, attending a private Catholic school, then Stanford University and USC law school. On graduation from USC in 1916 he joined Doheny Sr.’s oil business as a partner and became a multimillionaire instantly. Probate would value his personal estate at $12.5 million. In WWI he served as a lieutenant on a Navy cruiser and later behind a desk in Washington. In Los Angeles he was a member of the University Club, the Los Angeles Athletic Club, the Los Angeles Country Club. He had given handsome endowments to USC and sat as a university trustee; he was a part of the city’s aristocratic furniture—friendly, though spoiled and with flashes of his father’s temper.

  Theodore Hugh Plunkett, on the other hand, was born poor on March 28, 1895, in Illinois, and
came to Los Angeles in 1912. His parents, like many Midwesterners, had been seduced by the boosters’ promise of sunshine, health, and wealth. He got a job at a downtown service station owned by the family of Lucy Smith, soon to marry Ned Doheny. It was here that Plunkett and Ned Doheny first met. Plunkett changed the tires on one of Ned’s cars (Ned already had many) and the two struck up a friendship. Plunkett became a chauffeur for the Doheny family, and his WWI draft card shows that he enlisted in L.A. on the same day Ned did: June 16, 1917. Plunkett’s signature is clumsy, and the draft card states that he had blue eyes, light brown hair, and was of medium height and slender build. He served as a machinist’s mate on a submarine chaser, and, when the war was done, went back to work for his friend and boss. He was completely loyal to the Dohenys and they trusted him and treated him almost as a member of the family. He helped supervise the building of Greystone and wrote hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of checks in Ned’s name to pay the contractors. Plunkett was married, but he and Harriet, his wife of ten years, were estranged and without children. At the time of his death she was living in a retreat high in the Verdugo Hills, a neophyte dressed in Indian robes in one of Southern California’s many religious cults.

  “Ned and Plunkett went everywhere together,” E. L. Doheny had said in one of the earlier trials.

  “He acted as secretary to Ned, but their relationship was more than that of friends,” Frederic Kellogg, one of Ned’s attorneys, told the Times, a strangely formulated statement that hints at more than Kellogg probably intended. Leslie White would hear many rumors. One of them was that Plunkett and Ned Doheny had been lovers, killed by Ned’s wife, Lucy, out of jealousy.

  Plunkett’s story belongs to another of those genres typical of L.A., which remains utterly class-ridden despite seeming so up for grabs. He was the employee who became an intimate, privileged yet doomed, part of the entourage. He’d been with Ned Doheny in the New York bank in November 1921, when the teller rubber-banded the notes into five $20,000 bundles; he’d traveled with Ned Doheny with the black leather satchel on the train to Washington; he’d fixed drinks for Ned Doheny and Albert Fall while the cash was handed over and the men laughed and talked at the Wardman Park Hotel. He’d played an important walk-on in Teapot Dome; and his role had been about to return to haunt the Dohenys.

  Teapot Dome litigations had been dragging on for more than five years at this point. Doheny had lost the Elk Hills lease, and had been forced to make substantial reparation. Both he and Fall were acquitted of conspiring to defraud the government, but they were soon to be tried for bribery. The two cases would be heard separately—first Fall’s, then Doheny’s. Were Fall to be found innocent of taking a bribe, then ipso facto Doheny couldn’t have given one, and he’d be completely off the hook; but if Fall were found guilty, then Doheny would himself stand trial one more time. In Fall’s trial, much would hinge on Hugh Plunkett. For the first time Plunkett was being called upon to testify. The Dohenys had been trying to persuade him to check himself into Camarillo State Mental Hospital and dodge the subpoena.

  In the days prior to the killings Plunkett had been, according to differing accounts, only “slightly nervous” or “almost completely unhinged.” His state of mind, anyway, was subject for concern. He’d been taking Veronal and Dial, addictive barbiturates, to help him sleep. He’d bought clothes and serviced his car, perhaps in readiness for the trip to Camarillo. “The one thing that appeared to be constantly on his mind was the upcoming criminal trial,” said Mrs. George Johnson, Lucy Doheny’s personal secretary. For the exhausted Plunkett, the options looked grim: give false testimony at Fall’s trial, perjuring himself; tell the truth, betraying his friends and risking jail; or head off to the insane asylum. He had Doheny interests so much at heart he would lie awake thinking of them. Such was the background.

  10

  Cover-Up

  Leslie White’s job, as forensics investigator, was to put together a picture of the crime strictly from the physical evidence. For more than two hours he took photos and fingerprints and combed the room, making a minute study of every article of furniture and every inch of wall and floor space. When done, he gathered his gear and walked back down the long corridor. In Greystone’s lofty hallway he reported to Lucien Wheeler.

  Plunkett, it seemed, had come to Greystone at about 9:30 P.M. the previous night, letting himself in with his own key. By then Ned and Lucy were already in their own bedroom, getting ready to sleep, so Ned put on a dressing gown and told Plunkett they’d talk in the guest apartment. The conversation lasted more than an hour and grew heated. Plunkett—emotional, unwell, apparently almost hysterical—was digging in his heels and refusing to check himself into the sanatorium at Camarillo. Ned Doheny tried to change his mind. Plunkett grew enraged, produced a revolver, and shot his friend. Others heard the noise; they said it was like “furniture banging.” They came to investigate, whereupon Plunkett shot himself. This happened at about 10:55 P.M. It was a case of murder and suicide: Plunkett killed Doheny and then took his own life.

  “It was a crazed man instead of the trusted secretary who sent the death-dealing bullet into the young Doheny’s brain as the oil king’s son pleaded with him,” the Times would report.

  This version depended almost entirely on the statements of Ernest Clyde Fishbaugh, a doctor who’d been treating the Doheny family for seven or eight years by then. Fishbaugh told how he’d been summoned from his seat at a Hollywood theater with the news that Plunkett was at Greystone and acting crazy. The call had come from Ned Doheny, via Fishbaugh’s message service. Fishbaugh hurried from the theater and had his chauffeur drop him off at Greystone, where Lucy Doheny met him at the door and led him toward the room where Ned Doheny and Plunkett were arguing.

  “Plunkett stepped to the door and surprised us by saying, quite gruffly, ‘Don’t come in here!’ or words to that effect,” Fishbaugh told the Times, varying and cleaning up a little what he’d told the Examiner a few minutes before—when he’d described the door shutting softly, as if blown by a ghostly wind.

  “As I recall it, he shut the door hard,” Fishbaugh went on in his Times interview. “And it seemed that he had no more done that than there was a shot fired. I told Mrs. Doheny not to come in, but went in myself. I found Plunkett lying on the floor a few feet inside the door, his feet toward the door. He was shot through the head. He was not breathing. I quickly stepped into the guest room and saw Mr. Doheny stretched out on the floor near the foot of one of the twin beds. An overturned chair was near him. A pool of blood was near his head. He had been shot through the head.”

  Fishbaugh said that Plunkett must have shot Doheny as Fishbaugh was coming up the driveway. Earlier that Saturday afternoon, Fishbaugh said, he’d been with Ned and Lucy Doheny while they all tried to persuade Plunkett to check himself into Camarillo.

  Fishbaugh told how, in recent months, he’d treated Plunkett for abscessed teeth, sleeplessness, and chronic nervous disorders. The swiftly adopted idea that Plunkett had been on the verge of breakdown, or already insane, stems almost entirely from Fishbaugh’s statements. Others, even at the time, flatly contradicted the insanity notion, saying that Plunkett, while under strain, was well enough. But Fishbaugh hammered his line: “We all urged Plunkett to take a rest. He simply sat there. Hands clenched. Jaws set at times. He said he would come out of it all right. I could see it was no use to push him further.”

  This was how the story was shaping up, and Lucien Wheeler was too cool and experienced to venture an opinion at this point about whether he believed it or not. He did suggest, though, that something was odd in the testimony he’d heard from the maid, the nanny, the guards, the night watchman, and the liveried butler (whose splendid name was Albert Doar). Their tellings had grooved too neatly, as though all the staff had been schooled in a story and ordered to stick to it. He told White to go with the meat wagon and learn as much as he could from a detailed examination of the corpses.

  Shortly before dawn White arrive
d at the Beverly Hills mortuary to which the bodies of both men were first taken. Already the corpses had been stripped and laid out on adjoining drainage tables in a room of sparkling tile. White took more pictures, flashbulbs fizzing in the silence. He put his face close to the flesh of the dead men. “I found powder burns around the bullet-hole in Doheny’s head, proving that the gun was less than three inches away at the moment it fired. I found no such markings on Plunkett’s head,” he wrote. However, according to Fishbaugh, whose evidence the Times relied upon to make an elaborate, cartoon-like reconstruction of the crime scene, Plunkett had shot Doheny from a distance of several feet, while both men sat on chairs. This theory, always a little bizarre, was thus disproved by White even as the Times went to press with it.

  Other details nagged. Both victims had clearly been drinking, though Fishbaugh, Lucy Doheny, and the Greystone household staff had denied it. This was minor, though; the cigarette that had been between Plunkett’s fingers worried White more. He didn’t quite see that even an insane man would shoot his best friend, open a door, retreat from the people he saw approaching, and shoot himself in the head, all the while holding a cigarette as though he were a character in a drawing room comedy.

  White was inspecting the corpses when a uniformed L.A. County sheriff sauntered in and perched on one of the drainage tables. This amiable dude with a moustache had been sent to check up on him, White realized. He thought of the discrepancy, the little crack that Lucien Wheeler said he’d noticed in the schooled Greystone tellings. According to Fishbaugh, the shots that Plunkett fired were spaced apart by several minutes; but one of the maids said she’d heard the shots fired all together, “One-two-three.” Now these various details bundled themselves together and White’s growing unease found a focus.