L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America's Most Seductive City

Yorty was one of the oddest figures in California politics. Elected to Congress in 1936 as a radical liberal, he had run for mayor of Los Angeles during the 1938 mayoral recall as the favored candidate of Red Hollywood. He’d been soundly thrashed. Two years later, he ran for a seat on the city council and lost again. Instead, he settled for a seat in the California assembly. There he reinvented himself as a hard-core anti-Communist. It didn’t help. In 1940, he failed in his attempt to win election to the U.S. Senate. In 1945, he lost another mayoral election. He returned to Congress in 1950 and, four years later, promptly lost another Senate election. During the 1960 election, Yorty, ostensibly a Democrat, endorsed Richard Nixon. Kennedy’s victory promised two years of misery in Washington. So he decided to run for mayor again instead. In January 1961, he formally entered the race.

This time, Yorty’s timing was good. After two terms as mayor, Poulson seemed burnt out. A few months earlier, he’d announced that he wouldn’t seek a third term. The resulting cries of anguish from the downtown business establishment persuaded him to run one more time. Yorty now took aim at that establishment, which was led, as always, by the Los Angeles Times. He positioned himself as the champion of the “little guy” and as someone who would pay attention to the needs of the fast-growing San Fernando Valley When Poulson supporters mocked him for enthusiastically discussing new methods of trash collection, Yorty embraced the moniker “Trashcan Sam.” The candidate’s populist message played well. So did his direct, colloquial style, which was highly effective in the still newish medium of television. One of Yorty’s supporters was George Putnam, the news anchor at KTTV (and the inspiration for the character Ted Baxter on The Mary Tyler Moore Show), which was actually owned by the Los Angeles Times. In the old days, the Chandlers would never have tolerated a mixed message. Now, for whatever reason, they did. While the Times took the mayor’s side, Putnam was allowed to tout Yorty.

Poulson, meanwhile, struggled with rumors. A long-standing throat ailment was alleged to be cancer. Yorty’s team also maintained that Poulson had acquired a $250,000 ranch in Oregon during his time in office. (In reality, it was a much smaller property owned by his wife.) Then, in the final weeks of the campaign, Poulson came down with laryngitis. Photographs of the incumbent mayor in the hospital filled the papers in the days leading up to the primary election, which the mayor lost. Under Los Angeles’s system of nonpartisan elections, a runoff election was scheduled for June 1.

The anti-Yorty forces, led by Times man Carlton Williams, played tough, delving into some dubious ties between Yorty, the Teamsters, and Las Vegas gambling interests. The day after Yorty placed first in the primary vote, Poulson contended that Yorty’s campaign was “backed by the underworld.” Yorty responded by filing a $2.2 million libel suit. He countered that Poulson was controlled by an “overworld” consisting of Carlton Williams and the downtown business establishment. Yorty also stepped up his attacks on the police.

In his public appearances, he was always careful to distinguish between Chief Parker, whom he promised to keep on, and the Police Commission, which he criticized mercilessly. But as election day approached, Yorty sharpened his rhetoric against the chief, describing the current police commissioners as “Parker’s appointees,” promising to clean house, and insinuating that Parker would probably resign as well. In private, and to select black audiences, Yorty may have gone even further. Many Parker foes certainly believed they had received a firm promise that as mayor Yorty would force Parker out. Yorty also promised to fully integrate the department. Not surprisingly, candidate Yorty soon noticed that he was being trailed by plain-clothes officers from the LAPD intelligence division.

In fact, Yorty did have some worrisome connections. One of his earliest and strongest supporters was Jimmy Bolger, the man the Shaws had put into former chief James Davis’s office as a secretary (and minder). After Davis’s forced resignation, Bolger had found refuge on the Board of Public Works, which for many years was the bastion of the old Frank Shaw camp. Bolger was a notorious figure, one widely considered to have been a direct link to the underworld in the 1930s. It was natural that Parker would be concerned about his reappearance. Yorty was less understanding. Like Poulson before him, he was soon fuming about the LAPD’s “Gestapo-like tactics” and complaining that the incumbent mayor was attempting to scare law-and-order voters with the specter of Parker’s dismissal.

Ultimately, however, it was race that decided the election.