The Culture Broker: Franklin D. Murphy and the Transformation of Los Angeles.

Janssen, Volker

THE CULTURE BROKER: FRANKLIN D. MURPHY AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF LOS ANGELES

By Margaret Leslie Davis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007, 495 PP., illus., $34.95 cloth)

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IN HER PREFACE, Margaret Leslie Davis describes her biography of former UCLA Chancellor Franklin D. Murphy as the combination of two stories: "how Los Angeles refashioned itself between 1960 and 1994" and "how it came to be that one man envisioned a paradigm of philanthropy for an adolescent city." From his early deanship at the University of Kansas, to his tenure at UCLA between r960 and 1968 and his role as CEO and chair of the Times Mirror Company, to his corporate directorships and his many trusteeships (e.g., the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Ahmanson Foundation, the Getty Trust, the National Gallery of Art), Murphy's rapid social ascent and his many accomplishments in the promotion of art and culture truly "rivaled Phileas Fogg's eighty-day dash around the world."

Davis introduces us to the Los Angeles elite Murphy courted; rich biographical sketches include, among many others, "Los Angeles's female dynamo" Dorothy Chandler, wealthy oilmen J. Paul Getty and his sons, mortgage tycoon Howard Ahmanson, Murphy's good friend and Nixon's self-proclaimed "president's son-of-a-bitch" Bob Haldeman, Henry Ford II, billionaire Walter Annenberg, and dime-store tycoons Samuel and Rush Kress. No less poignant are the histories of the philanthropic, financial, and cultural institutions with which Murphy was affiliated.

A clever culture broker at a unique moment in Los Angeles's history, when its booming postwar economy created new fortunes in aerospace, petrochemicals, tract housing, automobiles, and mortgage banking, Murphy seemed as invested in civilizing "the pastel empire" as in securing its place in the nation. Ivy League prestige and the exclusivity of the eastern establishment remained steady benchmarks of success for Murphy. Though genuinely committed to civic harmony and the city's commonwealth, his cultural activism kept him involved in circles of the uncommonly wealthy.

Murphy's enormous contribution to Los Angeles's cultural infrastructure notwithstanding, whether the Getty, LACMA, UCLA, and the Huntington Library can provide the cohesive power and civic tradition Murphy called for following the riots of 1965 and 1992 remains uncertain. Without making a particular argument about the political and social role of philanthropy in mid-twentieth-century California, Davis gives her readers plenty of material to ponder regarding the successes and limitations of what Murphy praised as the "great American invention, the commingling of public and private funds to enhance the cultural life of our people."

Thoroughly researched and immensely detailed, Davis's writing can be a little gossipy; some passages read like a society page from the sixties newspapers. More than the sum of its parts, however, The Culture Broker is a remarkably useful and tremendously enjoyable contribution to the history of California's elite.

REVIEWED BY VOLKER JANSSEN, DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY, CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, FULLERTON AND UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA-HUNTINGTON INSTITUTE FOR CALIFORNIA AND THE WEST