Most people who have ever brushed up against Los Angeles society--at opening nights of the opera, at Music Center Blue Ribbon luncheons, or at untold numbers of black-tie fund-raising dinners around town--know her, or at least know of her.
Flora Laney Thornton, regal, immaculately coiffed and manicured and dressed, seemingly unapproachable to those not among her inner circle, has been one of the city's social fixtures for some 40 years.
Perhaps that's why, now that she's admittedly a "senior, senior citizen" of 83, a great-grandmother who could presumably putter with the orchids growing at her Bel-Air estate, she appeared an unlikely candidate to become the grande dame of that most egalitarian of institutions--the Los Angeles Public Library's Central Library.
Oh, she'd hate that description. Flora Thornton loathed the whole notion of being interviewed. Yes, she agreed, if only to talk up the library. Then she said she wanted to back out. When she finally does sit down, she blurts out midway, as if the whole exercise were fruitless: "Why don't you write about Caroline Ahmanson?"
"Flora is a modest person," says Evelyn Hoffman, executive director of the Library Foundation.
"She's very quiet about giving," says Lod Cook, chairman emeritus of Arco and founding chairman of the Library Foundation.
After the Central Library fire of 1986, when funds were being raised to rebuild and enlarge the building, Thornton was asked to make a substantial donation.
"They weren't asking for a little bit, they were asking for a lot," she recalls. The request was for $25,000, and she promptly declined. She hadn't even entered the building for 20 years, maybe longer. She gave a few hundred dollars.
When Thornton attended the library's opening gala in October 1993, she got a feeling for the beauty of the building and its vast resources.
A few months later, the Blue Ribbon, the Music Center's premier women's support group, of which she is a founding member, planned a luncheon at the library. Thornton offered to sponsor it. "I'm so happy you came today, because I consider the reopening of the Central Library of the same importance to the city as the opening of the Music Center," she told the participants. That same day, Thornton told Hoffman she thought the library deserved its own support group of women modeled after the Blue Ribbon. Educated, influential women from different parts of the city should be involved, she thought, and she volunteered to get the group going.
