Franklin Murphy? It's not a name that is widely known; even during his lifetime the public knew little of him. But for nearly thirty years, Murphy was the dominant figure in the cultural development of Los Angeles. Behind the scenes, Murphy used his role as confidant, family friend, and advisor to the founders and scions of some of America's greatest fortunes―Ahmanson, Rockefeller, Ford, Mellon, and Annenberg―to direct the largesse of the wealthy into cultural institutions of his choosing. In this first full biography of Franklin D. Murphy (1916-994), Margaret Leslie Davis delivers the compelling story of how Murphy, as chancellor of UCLA and later as chief executive of the Times Mirror media empire, was able to influence academia, the media, and cultural foundations to reshape a fundamentally provincial city. The Culture Broker brings to light the influence of L.A.'s powerful families and chronicles the mixed motives behind large public endeavors. Channeling more than one billion dollars into the city's arts and educational infrastructure, Franklin Murphy elevated Los Angeles to a vibrant world-class city positioned for its role in the new era of global trade and cross-cultural arts.

The Culture Broker: Franklin D. Murphy and the Transformation of Los Angeles

Biographies & Memoirs

Margaret Leslie Davis

Historical

University of California Press

Rivers In The Desert

In this richly researched and vividly written narrative, Margaret Leslie Davis presents the story of how a major American region recentered itself on the arts in the second half of the twentieth century, transforming Bunker Hill into a virtual Acropolis of the arts. Davis recounts in telling detail the saga of how the Music Center brought Los Angeles County to a new level of social and cultural definition through vision, philanthropy, public-private cooperation, architecture, and the performing arts. This region, centered in the City of Angels, was brought to new maturity by the overland arrival of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway in the 1880s and by the economic boom that followed, bringing an influx of dynamic migrants from older American regions along with immigrants to the United States. Then, in the early twentieth century, the region metropolitanized itself through water engineering, dams, and aqueducts, and through the cutting-edge industries of motion pictures and aviation. During World War II, Los Angeles was transformed into the Gibraltar of the Pacific, followed by a rise to global status in the second half of the twentieth century. And now a leading historian of this region relates the role played by the performing arts, and by those who believed in the need for these arts, in further defining the region in cultural terms. In the course of telling this story, Davis never loses her focus on either the Music Center or the arts being nurtured and presented there, whether that means the performances themselves or the shifts and evolutions of taste in music, opera, theater, and dance. Yet in doing this, she also achieves a history of region, philanthropy, politics, architecture, planning, crisis management, and public-private cooperation-and all this at the county level. Of all the fifty-eight counties of California, perhaps only Los Angles is large enough, diverse enough, wealthy enough, and culturally ambitious enough to sustain such a saga of art

The Music Center of Los Angeles County: The First 50 Years

Huntington Library Press

Childrens Hospital and the Leaders of Los Angeles: The First 100 Years

Childrens Hospital Los Angeles

Bullocks Wilshire

History

Americas

Balcony Pr

THE LOS ANGELES BILTMORE, THE HOST OF THE COAST BY The Regal Biltmore, 1998, First Edition. The Regal Biltmore Hotel has been a downtown landmark since it opened its doors in 1923. Few hotels have been so eagerly awaited, and few have fulfilled their promise as well as this elegant tribute to the art and architecture of the Renaissance. GREAT BOOK!

The Los Angeles Biltmore: The Host of the Coast

Regal Biltmore Hotel

A Lone Traveler: Einstein in California

William M. Kramer

Skirball Cultural Center

Over the past two decades, the history of Los Angeles has attracted a growing number of scholars drawn to the City of Angels because its story is at once intriguing in and of itself and illustrative of larger American issues. In Los Angeles, after all, was first achieved a paradigm - an aqueduct city in an arid to semi-arid environment, created through engineering and sheer force of will - that has since come to characterize other Southwestern cities as well, most notably Phoenix and Las Vegas. The creation of Los Angeles - or, more correctly, its re-creation - in the early twentieth century as an aqueduct city dramatically asserted that urban civilization could flourish in environments once thought hostile and prohibitive, provided that there be vision, engineering, enlightened self-interest, political will, and (if the truth be told) a certain willfulness, ruthlessness even, capable of imposing a city on an environment resistant of urbanization in traditional terms. From this perspective, the re-creation of twentieth-century Los Angeles through water engineering is a case study (for better or for worse) of how Americans have reorganized their environment through technology and how cities have been created in the wilderness.

Rivers in the Desert

E-Rights/E-Reads Ltd

The Lost Gutenberg: The Astounding True Story of One Book's Five Hundred Year Odyssey

Allen& Unwin

This book tells the fascinating true story of the world's most famous painting-and the cultural ambassador who helped bring her to America. In December 1962, "Mona Mania" swept the country as Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa set sail from Paris to New York for what many knew would be the riskiest art exhibition ever mounted. The driving force behind the famous painting's high-profile visit was First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, who convinced French Cultural Minister André Malraux and National Gallery Director John Walker to share the masterpiece with the American people. The White House Historical Association presents an enhanced and expanded publication of Mona Lisa in Camelot with archives drawn from the National Gallery of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Stewart McLaurin, President of the White House Historical Association, writes, "Margaret Leslie Davis's captivating account of the loan of the Mona Lisa by France is of special interest to the White House Historical Association because the circumstances that brought the masterpiece to the United States are the same circumstances that gave birth to the White House Historical Association. First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy was determined to share the greatest painting in the world with the American people, and just as determined to make the White House a "living museum" accessible to the nation..."

Mona Lisa in Camelot: How Jacqueline Kennedy and da Vinci’s Masterpiece Charmed and Captivated a Nation

White House Historical Association

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Books by Margaret Leslie Davis