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| Building Your Family's 100 Year Plan: The Series |
100 Year Plan Part III: The Practice of Charity
Brett Anderson and Thomas M. Kostigen
02/02/2004
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The following article is an excerpt from The 100 Year Plan series from the December, January, February and March editions of Robb Report Worth. To subscribe or to order back issues, please call (800) 777-1851 or order online now.
Why We Give: Philanthropy and the Family Mission
Dorothy Buffum Chandler, wife of Norman Chandler, the publisher of the Los Angeles Times, loved music. Her interest in art was only passing. Theater could amuse at times. But music, to her way of thinking, distinguished civilized society from the barbaric. And the city of Los Angeles, in her view, had only recently managed to hoist itself up on its civic hind legs. The Chandlers had made the salvation of the "hellhole of  the West" (L.A.’s quaint sobriquet in the 1870s) their vocation for almost a century, using the power of the Times to build harbors (Col. Harrison Otis, Norman’s grandfather, made the construction of San Pedro Harbor his cause célèbre in the 1890s), lay out subdivisions (Hollywood, along with many other communities, was the personal creation of Harry Chandler, Norman’s father), and found businesses (Harry backed Douglas Aircraft Co., which became McDonnell Douglas). In the process, they raised themselves up from obscurity to become one of the most influential families in America: In the West, what the Chandlers said, went. And Dorothy Chandler—"Buff" to her friends—said that Los Angeles would have a music center.
True to the entrepreneurial traditions of her husband’s tribe, Dorothy set about her task with resolve. Her work as a fund-raiser for Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles had already confirmed her reputation among the Old Guard of Pasadena and Hancock Park as a relentless soldier of fortunes (stalking them, that is), and then she commenced her personal program to construct a spectacular new home for the L.A. Philharmonic. Her sharp tongue and potent personality abetted her guerrilla tactics: She harangued and intimidated both friends and family members, often refusing to leave without a check in hand. When the force of her own personality proved insufficient, she would wield the power of the Times as a bludgeon—an especially unfortunate tactic so far as her husband was concerned, for he could then count on a combination of alternating flattery and invective over their evening martinis until he agreed to publish whatever views suited Dorothy’s immediate purpose.
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