Optical connections: The first lady of oil

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.