What do you do when you are married to the only man in America who can rival John D Rockefeller for wealth? An even better question, perhaps, is: what do you do when you are widowed and thereby inherit that wealth? Carrie Estelle Doheny, wife of the buccaneering oil baron, Edward L Doheny, was already quite the philanthropist thanks partly to her strong Catholic faith; but it was an incident concerning her eyesight while kneeling at mass that led eventually to the founding of one of her most important legacies.
Carrie Estelle Betzold, as she was then, was of German immigrant stock and working as a telephone operator at the Petroleum Exchange Center in Los Angeles when she met the oil tycoon, Edward Doheny. A self-made businessman, having spotted opportunities to make his fortune during the southern California oil boom, he was a controversial figure throughout his life. That life was the basis for the main character in Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel, Oil! which, in turn, was adapted as a film in 2007’s There Will Be Blood, starring Daniel Day-Lewis as the ‘Doheny’ character.
Betzold, aged 25, married the 44-year-old Doheny after a brief courtship in 1900. But she was not his first wife; indeed she was not even his first wife called Carrie. He had married his first wife, Carrie Louella Wilkins, in 1883 while trying to make his way in the silver-mining town of Kingston in south-western New Mexico. Two years later they had a daughter, Eileen, a sickly child, who died from heart disease just short of her eighth birthday. A son, Edward Jr, known as Ned, came along a year after Eileen’s death but, by then, the constant lack of funds was putting an unbearable strain on their marriage. Failed ventures had put Doheny deeply in debt; so much so that by 1892 he was unable to pay for his boarding room at his Los Angeles lodgings.
Doheny finally did find success but Carrie and he divorced in 1899, with Doheny gaining custody of Ned. Doheny married Carrie Betzold the following year, but his ex-wife, unable to cope with the final blow of losing Ned for good, committed suicide five weeks after the wedding. The new Mrs Doheny was destined not to have any children herself, but she brought up Ned as her own.
Doheny’s change of fortune came while he was billeted in that downtown Los Angeles boarding room. Having started life in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, the son of an Irish labourer who had fled the potato famine back home, he joined the US Geological Survey after leaving school.
The Doheny Eye Center UCLA was built with Doheny oil money in 1947
Using his new surveying skills, he drifted down to the south-west, filling various jobs while hoping to prospect for gold or silver. In Kingston, where he met his first wife, he also made the acquaintance of the two men who were to have a major impact on his life: Albert Fall, later to become Secretary of the Interior during Warren Harding’s presidency, and Charles A Canfield, a fellow prospector and later Doheny’s business partner.
One day he saw a passing wagon, which was carrying lumps of some greasy substance. Enquiring of the driver what the material was, he was told it was ‘brea’ which is Spanish for tar. When he visited the site, an empty lot, that the wagon-driver had been to, he saw that the area was a natural reserve of asphalt that was oozing to the surface and being used as fuel by a nearby factory. With a loan of $400 from Canfield (who had made, lost and made money again in various mining schemes) he bought a plot of land and started digging with his shovel. In order to go deeper, Doheny devised a system using a sharpened tree trunk as a drill. At just over 200 feet (about 69m) he struck oil. Doheny and Canfield sold the oil to local factories, using the money to buy more land and drill further wells. Others joined the rush and within a few years there were more than 3,000 wells in the Los Angeles area.
The California oil boom was well and truly set in motion when Doheny and Canfield persuaded the railroad owners to switch from coal to oil to power their locomotives. But Doheny moved on to new territory in Mexico, leasing a million acres of land around the Gulf of Mexico, drilling the first well there and many more including the world’s largest producing one at the time. His Mexican Petroleum Company built cities, roads and other infrastructure. By 1925 he was said to have a net worth of more than $100 million, more than the famous John D Rockefeller.
Doheny’s life was to take a more controversial twist when he became embroiled in what became known as the Teapot Dome Scandal which, in turn, led to tragic personal consequences. The episode began with Doheny sending Ned to New York City to withdraw $100,000 from his personal bank account, from where Ned and his childhood friend and Doheny company retainer, Hugh Plunkett, travelled to a Washington DC hotel to deliver the cash to Doheny’s old friend, Albert Fall, now in government office. Shortly afterwards, Fall awarded Doheny’s company a lucrative lease on oil-rich US Navy-owned land at Elk Hills, California. Another deal, similarly lubricated by an advance payment to Fall, was concluded with Doheny’s rival, Harry Sinclair, for the naval oil reserves at Teapot Dome, Wyoming. Once the scandal broke, Fall was convicted of bribery and became the first cabinet member to be jailed for a crime committed while in office. Both Doheny and Sinclair were found not guilty of bribery: as a reporter observed wryly, ‘You can’t convict a million dollars’.
Edward Doheny was the basis for the main character in the 2007 film, There Will Be Blood, starring Daniel Day-Lewis
Ned and Plunkett were also under indictment, and perhaps Plunkett realised the way the wind was blowing. He became increasingly agitated, going one evening to Greystone Mansion, the house Doheny had built for Ned as a wedding present, to talk to his friend. The official story is that Plunkett shot Ned and then killed himself, but there are many inconsistencies in the narrative that have never been satisfactorily cleared up.
One wonders what Carrie, a devout Roman Catholic, felt or knew about her husband’s activities, but she was heavily involved with looking after the family’s domestic finances and management of their estates. She was generous with donations to various causes, including the huge sum of $1.1 million for a library to be built at the University of Southern California in memory of Ned. During her husband’s bribery trials she began collecting rare books, culminating in the purchase of a Gutenberg Bible (since sold to Bill Gates). The collection grew to 7,000 volumes and 1,300 manuscripts, much of which she later donated to a Californian seminary; it was later auctioned at Christie’s in 1985, making $38 million.
Her charitable support of St Vincent’s Church and other Catholic causes led to her receiving the rank of Papal Countess by Pope Pius XII. And it was while kneeling at prayer that she noticed a change in her vision; investigations showed she had lost the sight in her left eye to glaucoma. The realisation of the preciousness of one’s eyesight led to Carrie founding an organisation whose aims would be to offer advanced treatment and carry out pioneering research to prevent, treat and cure vision disorders. The Doheny Eye Institute was opened in 1947 in Los Angeles.
Today the original institute is the research arm of the foundation, while an affiliation with the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) has created three treatment locations known collectively as the Doheny Eye Center UCLA. Some of the achievements of the institute include new methods of unblocking the drainage channels in glaucoma, replacement of retinal cells in macular degeneration and the development of standardised analyses of anatomical ocular changes that aid other scientists’ research.
Not content with her Eye Institute, Carrie also set up the Carrie Estelle Doheny Foundation in 1949 to provide a vehicle for funding good works and charities in and around Los Angeles. This work also continues today, even though Carrie died in 1958, her husband having predeceased her in 1935.
All good uses, then, of the Doheny oil millions. As Carrie said of her Doheny Eye Institute: its purpose would be ‘to further the conservation, improvement and restoration of human eyesight’.