|
TOEING
THE LINE
"I knew early on I had responsibilities. After age 12, there
were no summer playtimes: I toed the line by waiting on tables,
bagging groceries, doing grunt work. I knew the value of a dollar
early," recalls Chandler, whose family wealth is reckoned in
multiple billions.
As
a teen, Chandler was not allowed to have a car. Worse, when he was
breezing through 10th grade at the Cate School in Carpinteria, Calif.,
his parents ratcheted up the demands by arranging for him to attend
Phillips Academy in faraway New England.
"They
made some tough decisions. It would have been easier for them to
let me stay home, to give me a car, to buy me a surfboard. My mother
cried when I boarded the Santa Fe Chief to go away. But it was the
best thing that ever happened to me, having that kind of an upbringing,"
he says.
At
Andover, Chandler found the welcome as chilly as the weather. The
faculty had a "sink or swim attitude," and the other boys
thought California kids were just big, dumb womanizers, he recalls.
But he found acceptance on the varsity basketball, soccer and track
teams. In his senior year, he was track captain and class secretary
and was voted Most Likely to Succeed.
Raised
in a narrowly conservative atmosphere, Chandler says, he enjoyed
a social awakening at Andover. Some friends were from other lands;
some were of other races; one had a father who was a janitor in
Chicago. "I came to appreciate that white boys were OK, but
so were blacks and Latinos and Asians," he says. It was an
insight that would inform his later hiring practices.
GOING
HALF-HOG
At Stanford University, Chandler worked part-time, earning $250
to purchase a half-share in a used Harley Knucklehead motorcycle
with his roommate. He majored in history, minored in journalism
and participated in Navy ROTC. He became a world-class athlete in
the shot put, reportedly missing the world record by inches. He
was a top-ranked discus thrower as well.
After
graduation, he served in the U.S. Air Force. When he was discharged
in 1953, already a husband and father, he returned to L.A. to mull
over his future. Would he join the family business, or perhaps go
to medical school?
He
didn't mull long. At his Friday night homecoming, his dad handed
him the schedule for a six-year executive training program that
had been set up for him at the Los Angeles Times. It would begin
just after the stroke of midnight on Saturday.
AN
ANDOVER FAMILY—At the Los Angeles celebration of Campaign Andover
in March (left to right), Chandler appeared with Head of School
Barbara Chase; granddaughter Margot Chandler '00, and son Harry
Chandler '71. Wife Bettina also attended the festivities. The retired
publisher, who has four other children, serves as vice chairman
of the PA campaign effort in Southern California.
THE
PRINCE AS TRAINEE
For
the next 72 months, Chandler learned the newspaper business, working
mostly at night. Starting at $48 a week, he loaded delivery trucks
and worked in the press- room. He shifted the giant rolls of newsprint
paper that fed the presses. He set type, made plates and sold advertising.
He worked in distribution and layout and spent two years as a general
assignment reporter. He went from door to door pushing subscriptions.
He rewrote stories the beat reporters phoned in a half-hour before
deadline.
In
1959, he joined the executive ranks, and a year later, at age 31,
he ascended to the lofty position of publisher of the Los Angeles
Times.
Strictly
"a WASP Republican paper," the Times Chandler took over
had rarely shown a black face except in sports or entertainment.
Coverage of the Jewish, Latino and Asian communities was nonexistent.
It didn't cover labor, only management. This was not a subtle bias,
but an open, clearly stated policy, Chandler avers.
But
soon Norman Chandler, by then chairman of the Times Mirror, the
parent company, would spot his son consorting with the opposition.
"Was that Hubert Humphrey I saw you with yesterday?,"
the father would ask. "What was Jack Kennedy doing in the elevator?"
"These
are people important to our country," the Andover-educated
next generation would reply. "I want to get to know them."
CHANGING
TIMES
Chandler signaled a new era's arrival by running a five-part series
critical of the John Birch Society, whose excesses in routing out
alleged communist sympathizers previously had the Times' unwavering
support. As publisher, he hired more diverse employees, including
writers, and raided the New York Times and Washington Post newsrooms
for national writers and editors of international reputation. In
the 1968 presidential election, Chandler did the unthinkable by
making an editorial endorsement of Humphrey, the Democratic candidate.
In 1973, the newspaper that was said to have once "discovered"
Richard Nixon and thrust him into the public arena called for his
impeachment in the wake of Watergate.
It
was not just a diverse readership Chandler courted. Believing it
was his business to become personally acquainted with "everyone
who was important in the world," he made friends with Moshe
Dayan and Golda Meir. He got to know a generation of Russian leaders.
His social circle included the Kennedy brothers, Martin Luther King
Jr., Lyndon Johnson, Nelson Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger.
Expanding
the paper's international reach, Chandler put a large foreign staff
into place and set up a major Washington bureau. He diversified
the Times Mirror by buying up related companies ranging from TV
and cable systems to Oregon lumber mills that produced newsprint.
Under his leadership, the Times Mirror Company also annexed book
publishing companies, established a large magazine division and
acquired other newspapers, including the Baltimore Sun, Newsday
and the Hartford Courant.
WINNING
NUMBERS
As the scope and caliber of coverage expanded, circulation soared
from under 400,000 to over a million copies daily. While boosting
the news budget from $2 million to over $50 million, the Times Mirror
Company also saw profits climb. Circulation and advertising revenues
topped a billion dollars annually —more than all L.A. television
stations, magazines and community newspapers combined, Chandler
says.
Soon
Time magazine, which had named the Times as one of the 10 worst
metropolitan newspapers in the country just a year before Chandler's
ascent to publisher, began listing it among the 10 best. During
Chandler's two decades as publisher, the Los Angeles Times garnered
nine Pulitzer Prizes and a host of other awards.
"Otis
was the godfather of quality," Baltimore Sun publisher Michael
Waller recently told a New York Times reporter.
STEPPING
DOWN
In 1980, Chandler decided to step aside as publisher of the Times
and to become chairman of the company. Eight years later he moved
to executive committee chair, and he continued as a director until
1997, when he retired. While some of the reasons for his moves may
have been personal, the onetime publishing giant says he believes
in making way for younger talent.
"Most
newspaper publishers," he comments, "stay much too long,
not because they have an unfinished agenda, but because they like
power and prestige and being in the inner circle. It's the publisher
who gets invited to dinner at the White House, not the chairman
of the board."
Too,
publishers can get addicted to the hands-on thrill of a breaking
news story, he says, adding, "I had a wonderfully exciting
two decades. I had the assassinations of John Kennedy, Martin Luther
King and Bobby Kennedy. I had the Vietnam War, Sputnik, the invention
of the Pill. It was an incredible time! I did the best job I could
do for 20 years, then I got out of the way so other people could
do theirs."
STEPPING
OUT
Chandler's
vision for the future of the newspaper was that it would continue
to lead the Los Angeles community into the 21st century. He expected
it not just to keep up its nonpareil news coverage, but also to
stay on top of the new media, growing and changing in close collaboration
with Internet companies and other news providers.
But
five years ago, the Times Mirror's chairmanship passed over to Mark
Willes, a cereal company executive with no previous newspaper experience.
After hiring a similarly inexperienced publisher, Willes "downsized"
the company, laying off hundreds of workers, including 150 news
staffers, and shrunk the space devoted to news coverage. He sold
off ventures that to Chandler seemed vital and failed to forge the
desired connections with the dot-com world. In a much- publicized
fracas, Chandler sent an open letter to the Times news staff last
year denouncing the paper's leadership for entering a financial
arrangement that blurred the previously impenetrable wall between
editorial and advertising divisions—a wall seen by journalists
as the sine qua non of integrity and objectivity. It was an arrangement
that dealt "a severe blow to the paper's journalistic credibility,"
said the Wall Street Journal. One witness told Time magazine that,
given Chandler's status in L.A. history and the newspaper world
(not to mention the fact that his family still owned some 64 percent
of the Times Mirror), his denunciation came down "like a thunderbolt
from Zeus."
To
make matters worse, publisher Kathryn Downing responded by making
a public statement that Chandler was "an angry and bitter old
man." Chandler said little, but privately the Chandler family
and the company's directors put together a plan that would rediversify
the Times Mirror while also preserving the standards Otis had set
for the Times. In March 2000, it was announced the Chandlers were
selling the paper and the company they had owned since 1882 to the
Tribune Company of Chicago. The reported sale price was $6.5 billion
in cash and stock plus assumption of $1.6 billion in debt. A key
aspect of the sale, Chandler notes, was that Willes and Downing
would be replaced.
"I
think the choice the family had was to continue watching our paper
and our company go on a slow slide downhill, or to sell them. When
the Tribune approached us, it seemed like the right move. We knew
they were professionals in the newspaper business. They also have
22 TV stations and four radio stations. More importantly for the
future, they are hugely involved in the new media and the Internet,
with a substantial investment in dot-com companies. It seemed like
the perfect fit," he says.
HOG
HEAVEN
Today, Chandler, 72, spends his days in Oxnard, Calif., a few miles
north of the City of Angels, in the Vintage Museum of Transportation
and Wildlife, which he established in 1987. Housed in a warehouse-
like building inside an industrial park, it is a private museum,
open to the public once a month by appointment. Here, Chandler and
a staff of six preside over his personal treasures, which include
130 motorcycles that, to Chandler's delight, need to be driven frequently.
The museum also contains 60 automobiles, ranging from a 1903 Renault
to modern sports cars and high- performance vehicles. In addition,
there are more than 100 big game trophies from Chandler's hunting
expeditions all over the world, plus art depicting autos and animals.
The facility, which can accommodate 500 people, has been used for
fund-raising events by organizations that run the gamut from Stanford
University to a homeless women's assistance league.
With
wife Bettina, whom he married in 1981, Chandler lives in the mountain
community of Ojai. He cycles regularly, keeps athletically fit and
takes an active role in Ventura Country life and other volunteer
activities. As honorary chair of Campaign Andover in Southern California,
he spoke at the campaign celebration at Paramount Studios in March.
Chandler
also prides himself on his informal role as a local historian who,
through his journalistic endeavors, has chronicled and in some ways
even shaped the growth and development of one of America's largest
cities. It is not unusual for him to spend an afternoon describing
for a writer L.A.'s evolution from a cluster of orange groves to
what he calls "a thriving megalopolis that stretches from Santa
Barbara to the Mexican border" or extolling the accompanying
enrichment of its cultural scene.
"I'm
kind of a historical resource," he says with a smile.
|
