The Deal from Hell (8 page)

By the time Wolinsky joined the staff of the
Los Angeles Times
in 1977, much had changed, thanks to a gutsy, crafty woman who had married Norman Chandler, Harry Chandler's grandson. A strong-willed woman, Dorothy “Buff” Chandler knew how to get her way. After her husband became publisher of the
Times
, he staunchly supported Robert Taft as the Republican nominee for president in 1952. But Buff wanted Dwight Eisenhower to win the nomination. So she presented her husband with a proposition: If he ever wanted to have sex with her again, the
Times
would endorse Eisenhower. Ike got the paper's nod and the victory.

Buff had married Norman Chandler just after he'd graduated from Stanford University. Together they had Camilla and, two years later, Otis. Had Chandler family tradition prevailed, Philip Chandler, Norman's younger brother (who was allied with the more conservative wing of the family), would have assumed the publisher's chair in 1960 when Norman stepped down to become chairman of the Times Mirror Company, the newspaper's parent corporation. But Buff knew the paper had to abandon its old ways and adopt the new ethos of Southern California, which was becoming a more enlightened place full of people like her son, Otis, an adventurous, blond, blue-eyed Adonis.
After much arm-twisting, Buff persuaded Norman to name their son publisher of the
Times
.

On April 11, 1960, as flash bulbs popped, before an audience of 725 powerful Southern Californians, Norman stood at a podium at the Biltmore Hotel, a stately structure he had helped build in downtown Los Angeles, to name Otis the fourth publisher of the
Los Angeles Times
in its seventy-nine-year history. Otis, who maintained that he had no advance knowledge of his father's decision, stepped to the podium and uttered, “Wow.” He was thirty-two years old.

Otis Chandler transformed the
Times
as thoroughly as Clayton Kirkpatrick transformed the
Tribune
in Chicago. Both men successfully reformed widely disparaged, discredited newspapers and made them remarkable journals and newspaper industry leaders. Otis Chandler was lucky. During his remarkable tenure, Los Angeles had equally remarkable explosive population and economic growth, anointing it as the capitol of the new American West and a magnet for immigrants from around the world. The city overtook Chicago to become America's second-largest city, and the
Times
under Otis' leadership, eclipsed the
Tribune
in stature and influence. Otis opened news bureaus in international capitals including Paris, London, and Jerusalem, putting the
Los Angeles Times
on a par with the
New York Times
. He beefed up the paper's Washington bureau, paid top dollar for writers and editors who would win the paper dozens of Pulitzer Prizes, and exercised the paper's journalistic muscle on subjects that had once been verboten.

Less than a year after he took over, Otis published a series of stories on Robert Welch and the John Birch Society, a right-wing political organization that portrayed Eisenhower as a Soviet dupe, the United Nations as a Communist front, and Earl Warren as a “red” Supreme Court justice. From a journalistic perspective, the series of five stories that exposed the organization's hypocrisy and deep roots in California were tame; they started in the opinion section, not on page one, and ran randomly on page two, or mostly in obscure spots inside the newspaper. But Otis' uncles, Philip and Harrison, and his aunt, Alberta, were Birch Society benefactors and staunch supporters of Welch.
Friends and neighbors took notice and started talking. Otis followed up by ordering a tough editorial in the Sunday
Times
that slammed Welch and the Birchers for their attacks on Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, and the Dulles brothers.

“What is happening to us,” the editorial asked, “when all loyal Americans are accused of being Communist dupes unless they subscribe to the radical and dictatorial direction of one self-chosen man? . . . The
Times
does not believe that the argument for conservatism can be won—and we believe it can be won—by smearing as enemies and traitors those with whom we sometimes disagree.” Otis put the editorial at the top of page one and signed it himself. Readers in conservative enclaves like Pasadena were outraged, and the
Times
circulation immediately dropped by 15,000, a staggering sum. (Controversial stories of the era typically prompted a dozen or so folks to drop the paper.) Though it resulted in a loss of subscribers, the editorial represented the
Times
' declaration of independence from the past and made Otis an idol to generations of journalists like Wolinsky.

A new generation of young men and women was to carry Otis' torch into the future. In a sense, the journalists who fought to preserve the unique brand of journalism that Otis created and championed were the unsung heroes and villains of the
Los Angeles Times
. Fiercely loyal to Otis' standards, journalists like Wolinsky also treated the mere whiff of change as a dire threat to the man's legacy. Longtime
Los Angeles Times
editor John Arthur once told a magazine writer: “Otis is Zeus.”

On the surface, Wolinsky was an odd keeper of Otis' high journalistic standards. Growing up in East Los Angeles, Wolinsky didn't read the
Times
. Like me, he was not one of those kids who started a neighborhood newspaper and became the editor of his high school newspaper. “My dad was an electronics developer at McDonnell Douglas. I'm not even sure what he really did. My mom was a housewife. We didn't take a daily paper. We couldn't afford it,” he recalled. Wolinsky's neighborhood wasn't
Times
territory, either. A vast swath of barrios and industrial shops between the Los Angeles River and the city's
eastern border, East Los Angeles, is a throwback. The once-dusty streets are now paved, and backyard chicken coops and citrus groves are rare. But the east side is the underbelly of a city better known for glitz and glamour.

By the time Wolinsky graduated from the University of Southern California, Otis had built the
Times
into one of the best and most prosperous papers on the globe by following the money. The paper's readers didn't live on streets like Bleakwood, or in barrios like Boyle Heights. They lived in Bel Air, Beverly Hills, Westwood, Culver City, the South Bay, or Malibu, alongside moguls and movie stars.

Given how large and diverse Los Angeles was, the
Times
needed people like Wolinsky, locals who understood the challenging nature of the vast metropolis the paper covered. Reporting on a large metropolitan area is no easy task for any newspaper. Under Otis, the
Times
circulation area grew to encompass some eighty-eight separate municipalities, ranging from Pasadena, the tony, tree-lined town that seems as midwestern as sweet corn, to Little Saigon, a vertical strip mall that rests on a flat sandy plain home to some 135,000 Vietnamese. Parts of Santa Ana in Orange County would be easy to mistake for a town in Mexico, while the neighborhoods around South Central and East Florence in Watts resemble the most hard-boiled ghettos in the Bronx. The northern reaches of the San Fernando Valley stretch to an urban desert, and the posh enclaves along the Pacific Coast Highway north of Santa Monica symbolize raw wealth and power. The
Los Angeles Times
circulates in an area about as large as the state of Ohio, but one that ultimately lacks a center of gravity. Despite years of development, downtown Los Angeles remains a drab urban landscape; its most enduring features are Frank Gehry's sweeping stainless-steel Walt Disney Concert Hall and a skid row that resembles a Palestinian refugee camp. (In one ten-square-block area, some 114 dialects are spoken.)

Though he grew up in a barrio, Wolinsky understood Los Angeles as well as did Otis, who had created several local editions of the
Times
to serve its diverse constituencies. One edition of the
Los Angeles Times
served the San Fernando Valley; one, Orange County. There was
a paper for the San Gabriel Valley, and a paper for San Diego. “The way it was supposed to work,” recalls Pete King, a longtime
Times
writer and editor who would one day recruit Wolinsky to run the a.m. city desk, “is that we would produce six different papers.... These papers had their own editors and in some cases, publishers. The talent level was so high that we could take the best of the stories for these papers and put them into one paper. We made a mega paper out of the six papers for people who wanted it.... The
LA Times
was important to a certain Los Angeles—the suburban, middle-class, upper-class Angelino. It was never a paper of East LA or the barrios.” Over the years, the paper would be accused of having a bad case of penis envy of the
New York Times
, but King said the brand of journalism that Otis had created really wasn't about “knocking the
New York Times
off its perch.”

“There was an
LA Times
way of doing journalism,” King explained. “We didn't get plaudits for it. In fact, we were sometimes ridiculed by East Coast papers. But we were wildly successful. We had some excesses and we had some bad days. But on our good days, you wouldn't see anything like it in any other newspaper. . . . It was doing it our way. It fit the city. . . . It's not like we didn't do daily journalism. Like I'm city editor and Rodney King happened,” said King in a reference to a police assault of the African American man that led to highly publicized riots in the 1990s. “It was not like we didn't cover the news. But we also did the narrative story. That was our ‘A' game. I had a goofy theory. A story would jump [from one page to another] so many times, but the coverage was like LA, a city of sprawl. People didn't leave for work until 9 a.m. because of the traffic. So they had time to read.”

It's easy to see why King, Wolinsky, and other journalists would go to extraordinary lengths over the years to protect Otis' legacy. Otis understood that the city he and his ancestors had built needed to be informed and entertained, and he capitalized on the power of his journalists and what they really cared about—their journalism—to provide that information and entertainment, elevating them to an almost mythical status in the newsroom and beyond. Reporters and editors at Otis'
Los Angeles Times
didn't live by the rules that applied
to others. They were well paid, flew first-class on every trip over five hundred miles, and spared no expense on stories. And editors worked hard to make sure it stayed that way.

Nowhere was the ability of the
Los Angeles Times
to entertain on better display than in a celebrated feature that Wolinsky and other
Los Angeles Times
editors would fight to preserve for years: Column One—deeply reported, well-written stories. Through meticulous reporting and lucid writing,
Times
reporters and editors simply took their readers to places where other newspapers couldn't or wouldn't go. When editors needed an arresting profile on a controversial figure like Washington, D.C., mayor, Marion Barry, they called on a stable of gifted writers like Bella Stumbo who would capitalize on the paper's fat expense accounts to fill its generous news hole with deep reporting and copy that crackled. Stumbo and other
Los Angeles Times
writers simply spent more time, more money, and more and better words on a story, overwhelming would-be competitors.

The
Times
that Otis had inherited from his father was fat—full of ads bought by companies and merchandisers who coveted Otis' well-heeled readers. At the top of the front page on March 12, 1961, just after Otis became publisher, two numbers—21 and 430—competed for attention with the infamous signed editorial on the John Birch Society. That Sunday's
Times
had 21 sections and 430 pages to hold ads for everything from Liquid Snail Killers from the Cha Kent Company to a spread for the Dinah Shore Models Wardrobe at a local department store. Otis built upon that solid foundation to make the paper more lucrative so he could pay his journalists top dollar. He took the Golden Age of Journalism to Platinum. Ads created holes for copy written by those lucky enough to work at the
Times
.

To Wolinsky, the
Los Angeles Times
was more than a fat and happy place to work: “For me, it was a symbol. When you saw the people walking down the street with the
Los Angeles Times
, it was a symbol that they'd made it in society,” he offered. The paper lured many star reporters westward from newspapers in the East and Midwest, but employed just as many Californians—journalists who'd labored at
smaller papers to land a coveted job at the
Times
. Kathy Kristof grew up reading the
Los Angeles Times
and wanted to work there from the time that she decided to be a journalist. “I really didn't realize what we had until I started traveling and saw other papers. It was a unique paper. There was nothing like it in the country.”

After graduating from USC, Wolinsky was bound and determined to “land a job at the
Los Angeles Times
.” After five years of applying unsuccessfully for a roster of
Times
jobs, he got a break when he was a reporter for
The Breeze
covering Inglewood, a community in the South Bay, a collection of towns south of the city. The
Times
had a reporter in Inglewood but her husband was under investigation for a conflict of interest (he had a stake in Inglewood casinos), and Wolinsky applied for her job.

His moxie paid off. He soon became the South Bay reporter for the
Los Angeles Times
.“At first,” Wolinsky recalled, with his trademark laugh, “I thought I had made a huge mistake. My editor was Hank Osborne. He'd assign these ridiculous stories. He once had someone cover the marathon and write stories about runners who would stop to defecate in the bushes. He'd have you go out and put a nickel, a dime, and a quarter on the sidewalk and when someone would stop and pick one up, you were supposed to interview them and write a story about what they picked up and why. I thought, ‘This can't be the famous
LA Times
.'”