A Bright and Guilty Place: Murder, Corruption, and L.A.'s Scandalous Coming of Age Read Online Free PDF Page A

action Clark saw, but certainly he flew sorties, was shot at and shot back. The life expectancy of pilots on the Western front was brutally short—often only a matter of weeks. Harold Beaumont, one of Clark’s American friends, was killed on July 17, 1918. “You have to carry on,” Clark wrote to his brother, but noted too that in a rage during the mess that night he had smashed a bottle and cut his hand. “Damp hangars, muddy roads, crystal blue skies. I’ll miss Harold. He was a crack pilot. I suppose now I’ll have to kill a German for him.” A photograph of the time shows Clark, dressed in uniform with a scarf trailing around his neck, leaning against the fuselage of a single-engined SE5 fighter. He’s tall, broad-shouldered, dark-haired. His eyes look tired, but his expression is calm. He liked and needed action and didn’t forget the spirit of the war. Always, after he’d returned from France to find an America that increasingly shrugged off wartime idealism in favor of realism and then hedonism, he wore an RFC badge on his lapel, a pin with a pair of wings.
    Clark had a cool bravado that could amount to cruelty, but he was close to his family and never doubted he would return to Los Angeles. He was determined to succeed in the city where he had grown up, but questioned what career he should pursue. In 1920 he took a screen test with First National Pictures. “My head’s not empty enough to be an actor,” he told his brother. Or maybe Clark decided to pursue what looked like a steadier career. He spent the next two years studying law at USC and left, without graduating, as soon as he was admitted to the California Bar on March 3, 1922. Again, we might detect impatience here, the action of a man determined to get ahead fast—although forgoing law school graduation was frequent practice for law students in those days, when the route to a professional career was more flexible. It could be that he was strapped for cash—a common occurrence throughout his life. The handsome and socially connected war hero joined Wellborn, Wellborn & Wellborn, a small but established and powerful downtown law firm.
    The Wellborns had for decades been players in the growth of Los Angeles. Olin Wellborn, Sr., a Confederate veteran of the Civil War, had been a three-time congressman in Texas who secured the federal judgeship for Southern California in 1895. For a while he partnered with oil magnate E. L. Doheny in a number of ventures. Though Olin Wellborn, Sr., died in 1921, his sons and grandsons continued the firm and still represented E. L. Doheny and had office space in Doheny’s magnificent art-deco Petroleum Securities Building at Olympic and Figueroa.
    It was here that Dave Clark went to work, seeing the downtown building boom firsthand and learning his trade as the fast and brittle mood of the 1920s took hold. Women’s skirts soared above the knee, the stock market scaled new peaks, a lot of people expected to get rich in a hurry, and Clark moved with ease among other lawyers, reporters, and cops. He was happy to throw off his coat and get down on the floor and play cards or shoot craps with the guys. Dick Steckel, a police captain who worked way down in Venice, was a particular friend. They golfed together. Clark was a championship level golfer, for years featured on the USC alumni team. He rode well and played polo too. He was charming, forceful, and perhaps vain—confident in his charisma and looks.
    In 1926 he married Nancy Regina Malone, the petite and beautiful daughter of a New York judge. Nancy brought with her a little girl, Mary Lenore, her daughter from a previous relationship. During that same year Clark made another big decision, leaving Wellborn, Wellborn & Wellborn to join the fast-growing District Attorney’s office. He wanted to make a name for himself as a litigator. For a starting salary of $375 a month, he became one of twenty deputies in the D.A.’s trial department, which was responsible for