Margaret Leslie Davis' ongoing examination of Los Angeles through the lives of its civic and cultural leaders is a grand project, deserving of generous praise. More than any writer of our time, she is methodically supplying this city with an understanding of itself.
Davis' devotion to the task is evident in her choice of subjects -- previous biographies were on William Mulholland and Edward Doheny, of water and oil fame and infamy -- and in the rigorous research that is her signature. She is amassing a body of work without peer and, in the process, is delivering subtle lessons for today's leaders -- or what's left of them.
Davis' latest addition to that oeuvre is "The Culture Broker: Franklin D. Murphy and the Transformation of Los Angeles," and it is a significant, if imperfect, contribution.
Murphy, who as UCLA chancellor, arts patron, philanthropist and head of the Los Angeles Times' then-parent company helped shape modern Los Angeles, proves a delicious and elusive subject. One of a host of Midwesterners who would come to define the City of Angels, Murphy was born in Kansas City, Mo., in 1916 to a medical professor and a concert pianist. He trained as a physician and gained national attention in his early 30s with his campaign to bring doctors to rural Kansans. At age 35, he became president of the University of Kansas, where he presided over an expansion of its artistic endowment but also clashed repeatedly with the state's envious, cost-cutting governor. UCLA eventually beckoned, and Murphy went west in 1960, charged with turning the university, then a mere adjunct to UC Berkeley, into a world-ranking institution.
Those earlier years -- of Murphy's adolescence and rise to influence in the Midwest -- are given short shrift as Davis rushes to bring him to Los Angeles, the central object of her concern. That's her prerogative, of course, but her book pays a price -- we don't see Murphy's character develop.
The author views him with detachment: She tells us of his intellectual prowess and subtle alienation from his wealthy contemporaries without letting us feel much of it; she acknowledges his extramarital affairs but gives little hint of the passion or angst those must have entailed; when Murphy dies, he slips away mid-paragraph, with barely a hint of momentousness. It was, Davis blandly concludes, "the end of an era." That sense of remove begins with the decision not to chronicle his young life and pervades the entire book. As a result, Murphy leaves this narrative much as he enters it: intriguing and influential yet distant.
