Tag Archives: USC

The Doheny Library Murals at USC

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The Short View: Doheny family, terribly wealthy oil tycoons in Los Angeles, big supporters of USC, gave this library to honor their dead son, who went there, and was a war hero.

The Long View: In 1892 an old prospector and generally ruthless bastard Edward Doheny, Sr. struck oil in LA when he spotted pobladores’ caretas going to and from the La Brea Tar Pits, as they had for generations, to get pitch to line the roofs of their adobes. Doheny sucked LA dry of oil, and then went on to drill gushers in Bakersfield and Mexico. He cornered West Coast oil, and became the only man in the country to stare down John D. Rockefeller and the Standard Oil Trust. He was the richest man in California by 1902. There Will Be Blood, was about Doheny.



Smart but spoiled young son Ned was sent to USC where, as LA’s richest heir, he was BMOC. He studied business, married and had a bunch of kids right off. In 1917 Ned was called into the Navy for World War I. Ned learned all about how the Navy was being modernized to run on oil, not coal. He learned where the Navy got that oil, and how much it paid for it. Somewhere in the wide, wet world of the Navy, Ned met Hugh Plunkett, who became Ned’s buddy, friend, flunky, fixer, enabler, crony, private secretary. After the war Hugh becomes “like one of the Doheny family.” The class difference between them, really, came down to those few years of polish provided by Ned’s Trojan education and of course the Doheny millions. But young Plunkett must have been eager to do anything to please these glamorous people.


In 1922, Plunkett accompanied his boss, Ned, on a trip to Washington, D.C., carrying a black bag full of $100,000 in cash. Ned was giving it to Sec. of the Interior Ball, to bribe him for looking the other way on Teapot Dome, one of the Navy’s oil leases. Plunkett was just the bag-man, but he certainly, and probably eagerly, handed the bag of money safely to the Secretary. He and Ned were guilty as hell of bribery.



By 1929, the story was out and the “Teapot Dome Scandal” was disgusting the nation. Unsavory bribes, including Ned’s, came to light. Pres. Harding was so deeply implicated he simply sailed away and died in the frozen north. And in Los Angeles, at the famous Greystone Mansion, both Ned Doheny and Hugh Plunkett were found dead, each shot through the head.

There is all kinds of speculation about who killed whom, but the View has sifted the evidence to conclude: that Hugh, who was in way too deep, was mentally fragile and panicked about becoming the fall guy for the Dohenys. He must have threatened to turn state’s evidence; whereupon, as he tried to leave the bedroom, Ned shot Hugh in the back of the head. Then, some time later, after a doctor had been summoned, Ned shot himself in despair at everything he’d done, especially the betrayal of his friend, servant, secretary, amanuensis.

The Dohenys, staunch Catholics, did not bury Ned in sacred ground, but near Hugh, in Forest Lawn. This suggests they knew Ned was Hugh’s murderer and himself a suicide. If anything, the gay subtext that was inevitably read into the murders distracted the public from the real story, one of government corruption by the Dohenys. Clearly, the two men were not in any way gay, but just as clearly, they had a very tight and complex male relationship. It was ultimately expressed in an episode of shockingly intimate violence. Everybody blamed Hugh, obviously a hot-headed servant gone mad.


Edward Sr. was quietly acquitted of the Teapot Dome charges, one suspects out of sympathy for the loss of his son, or the feeling that a kind of poetic justice had been served by the bloodbath. Then Wall Street crashed. Scandal forgotten, the Dohenys gave USC the absolutely splendid Edward L. Doheny, Jr. Memorial Library. The Treasure Room, built as the rare book room, has gorgeous friezes around the upper walls, portraying the development of literacy, and obviously starring the 1930 USC Track and Field Squad and Water Polo Team, as models.


The striking murals would be poignant enough, with their classic, innocent, “old college days” homoeroticism. But, bearing the story of Ned and Hugh in mind, the Viewer can interpret all kinds of fascinating overtones in the figures. The artist, Samuel J. Armstrong, was Philadelphia-trained, and went on to be a chief animator for Walt Disney. Armstrong apparently was one of the directors of “Fantasia,” particularly the live-action sequences including Stokowski (Leopold!) leading the fabulous Philadelphians in the Toccata and Fugue.