Thinking Big

"Thinking Big was the first serious look at The Los Angeles Times and the Chandler family, who published the most powerful newspaper in California for close to a century. It was an excellent book. The publishing history of this book is almost a lesson in itself, regarding just how powerful the Chandler family really was. Thinking Big had a big publisher but there was a virtual blackout on it in The Los Angeles Times , and no one else around gave it any kind of promotion at all. It went through a single printing and disappeared just a few years after it was published. Trying to track down and buy a copy became a job in itself. The Chandler family married the power of a major metropolitan newspaper with avid real estate acquisition. They controlled vast expanses of the city and much of what was written about in the city. This book is one of the reasons I worked at The LA Times. And Thinking Big inspired me to try to carry forward the thesis of Robert Gottlieb and Irene Wolt in my own book. I took what they did – as well as what David Halberstam did with the Chandlers’ story in The Powers that Be – and I took it a step further. I focused on Otis Chandler, the last great publisher of The Los Angeles Times and by telling his life story I told the story of his family, the newspaper he led, the industry he was a part of and the city he helped shape. By focusing on Otis I gave the reader a story to follow. I did the same thing with Lew Wasserman, who was the CEO and guiding force of Universal Pictures, in my book The Last Mogul . So I guess I would recommend Privileged Son over Thinking Big or even The Powers That Be , which focuses less on narrative. I like a good yarn as well as detailed history that explains the land and the culture and the people in power. That’s what Privileged Son does. Los Angeles peaked in about 1973 and it’s been downhill ever since. I was born in LA in the late 1940s. I’ve seen it grow from the disparate suburbs that Dorothy Parker described to a metropolis that was manageable. Then during the eighties, when I was at The Los Angeles Times, I saw LA eat up everything around it and become a megalopolis. The quality of life isn’t as good, the traffic is unspeakable, the air quality sucks and, once again, there are water problems. And all of that is getting worse."