Lee told Judy that he knew about his father's official wife, Mary Louise, who is buried next to him in Brand Cemetery behind Brand Park.
But when Birdie became pregnant, Lee wrote, Brand, "being a right guy . . . married my mother in Tijuana, Mexico, although he already had a wife in the U.S. I assume at that time of the century it was better to be a bigamist than bring a bastard into the world."
Lee was born June 8, 1922. Jack arrived 18 months later. Lee said the second pregnancy infuriated Brand, who accused Birdie of infidelity. But Lee told Judy that such suspicions were "hogwash," and that he and his brother often were mistaken for twins.
The Gordon family sent Judy Brand a variety of memorabilia, including a copy of Birdie's deed for the property on Rinaldi Street and photos of Brand, Birdie and friends clearly taken at Brand's Mono Lake retreat.
With such evidence in hand, Judy Brand felt sure enough to update her biography of Brand and to donate it to the Brand Library and Art Center.
But L.C. Brand's official reputation remained pristine. The city released a video about him last year without mentioning the Gordons or any hint of infidelity.
"Oh yes, we've heard those rumors," writer and documentarian Juliet Arroyo said. "But we could never prove them."
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'Mythtress' or more?
I, too, wondered about definitive proof, so I called Paula Hinkel of the Southern California Genealogical Society. "Infidelity," she told me, "wasn't limited to the wealthy, or any certain ethnicity or age or group of people." She said DNA is the gold standard for proving paternity and cautioned, "without proof, there is no truth, only myth -- making Birdie his mythtress."
My editors demanded more than myth.
I told Judy Brand the newspaper would foot the bill. The question was, who would we test?
The major players in the drama were long dead.
Brand died of prostate cancer in 1925, at 65. His wife, Mary Louise, died in 1945. Birdie died in 1954, after selling her land and moving into a duplex on Brand Boulevard in San Fernando.
By the time we decided to test, Jack, Lee and Ken Gordon had died too. So had Judy Brand's ex-husband. We would have to resort to more distant relatives.
I contacted Bennett Greenspan, president of Texas-based Family Tree DNA, whose company provided genetic testing for a massive project to trace the migratory history of the human race. He said he was confident he'd be able to find the truth.
