Chapter and Verse on Flora Thornton

Most people who have ever brushed up against Los Angeles society--at opening nights of the opera, at Music Center Blue Ribbon luncheons, or at untold numbers of black-tie fund-raising dinners around town--know her, or at least know of her.

Flora Laney Thornton, regal, immaculately coiffed and manicured and dressed, seemingly unapproachable to those not among her inner circle, has been one of the city’s social fixtures for some 40 years.

Perhaps that’s why, now that she’s admittedly a “senior, senior citizen” of 83, a great-grandmother who could presumably putter with the orchids growing at her Bel-Air estate, she appeared an unlikely candidate to become the grande dame of that most egalitarian of institutions--the Los Angeles Public Library’s Central Library.

Oh, she’d hate that description. Flora Thornton loathed the whole notion of being interviewed. Yes, she agreed, if only to talk up the library. Then she said she wanted to back out. When she finally does sit down, she blurts out midway, as if the whole exercise were fruitless: “Why don’t you write about Caroline Ahmanson?”

“Flora is a modest person,” says Evelyn Hoffman, executive director of the Library Foundation.

“She’s very quiet about giving,” says Lod Cook, chairman emeritus of Arco and founding chairman of the Library Foundation.

After the Central Library fire of 1986, when funds were being raised to rebuild and enlarge the building, Thornton was asked to make a substantial donation.

“They weren’t asking for a little bit, they were asking for a lot,” she recalls. The request was for $25,000, and she promptly declined. She hadn’t even entered the building for 20 years, maybe longer. She gave a few hundred dollars.

When Thornton attended the library’s opening gala in October 1993, she got a feeling for the beauty of the building and its vast resources.

A few months later, the Blue Ribbon, the Music Center’s premier women’s support group, of which she is a founding member, planned a luncheon at the library. Thornton offered to sponsor it. “I’m so happy you came today, because I consider the reopening of the Central Library of the same importance to the city as the opening of the Music Center,” she told the participants. That same day, Thornton told Hoffman she thought the library deserved its own support group of women modeled after the Blue Ribbon. Educated, influential women from different parts of the city should be involved, she thought, and she volunteered to get the group going.

So Thornton founded the Council of the Library Foundation, and tapped Joni Smith from the Blue Ribbon board as president. Now the council is taking on its first major fund-raiser to mark the library’s 125th anniversary. On Nov. 17, some 50 to 75 private dinner parties will be held at the homes of supporters (including Thornton’s) with an array of authors.

“She’s the person you don’t want to say ‘no’ to,” Smith says. “She really is an inspiration to me. You sort of put people like her on a pedestal because of their accomplishments. They don’t have to do anything, and they do everything and do it well.”

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Thornton doesn’t seem like the woman-behind-the-man type. Yet she maintains that her role as wife of 41 years to the late Charles B. “Tex” Thornton, owner and CEO of Litton Industries and a larger-than-life corporate visionary, was traditional. She raised two sons, was a Cub Scout mom and entertained.

The Thorntons arrived in Los Angeles in 1948 to find a city where industry was booming but cultural institutions were just getting started. When the couple was asked to join those who were founders of the Music Center and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (where there is a Charles B. and Flora L. Thornton Gallery), Tex was indisputably the presence.

“I was very much a homemaker because of my husband being so busy. He was involved in things, and I felt one was enough,” she explains.

The Thorntons became social friends of the Ed Carters, Norman Chandlers and Henry Salvatoris.

“I loved being a hostess,” Flora says. “We were in the inner circle, but I was not involved in fund-raising.”

Before Tex died in 1981, Flora did something on her own “as a sort of fluke” that changed her life: She enrolled in a two-year series of humanities colloquia at Claremont Graduate School.

“They called it ‘updating your liberal arts education,’ ” says Thornton, who hadn’t completed her studies at Texas Technological University in Lubbock.

“I was motivated to find a focus for the rest of my life,” she says. “The children were grown. It seemed to me I needed expansion in my life. The world was changing, and I wanted to know what was really going on. It seemed my friends were all reactionary and status quo.”

A course on problem-solving particularly stimulated her. When the hypothetical problem was global food supply, Thornton says she became aware of progress made in nutrition at a time when practically no one had heard of cholesterol.

Shortly after her husband’s death, Thornton heard that the California Museum of Science and Industry was in search of a sponsor for a nutrition exhibit. When she heard that a candy company was going to underwrite it, she thought it in “no way should be sponsored by someone with something to sell,” and stepped forward to underwrite it herself.

“That was my first involvement in my second career in life,” as she puts it. “From there, one thing led to another.”

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Growing up in Fort Worth during the Depression, Thornton says she had always been aware of the meaning of a dollar and early on learned a sense of stewardship.

“It’s whatever we’re brought up with in the church. It’s a concept of being responsible in making decisions and utilization of assets to the best advantage. Like my husband said, money represents somebody’s endeavor and it should be appreciated as such.”

In 1983, she established the Flora L. Thornton Foundation. She has given money to support, among other things, the Flora L. Thornton Community Health Education Program at St. John’s Hospital, where she is on the board; the Flora L. Thornton Chair in Preventive Medicine at the USC School of Medicine; and the Charles B. Thornton Administrative Center at Pepperdine University. Thornton is a big name at Pepperdine. A member of the board of regents, she largely funded the Howard A. White Center, the student recreation center.

“She didn’t want her own name on it, she really wanted to honor Dr. White, who was a close friend,” says Jeff Bliss, director of public information. The school also has a Flora Laney Thornton Professorship in Nutrition, which was established in the late ‘70s with Tex. Indeed, lunch served in the sun room of her home is impressively healthful and spartan--sliced fruit, a scoop of cottage cheese and a small bran muffin.

“I read cookbooks looking for vegetarian recipes,” she says. She’s now a fan of tofu, legumes, fresh vegetables, pasta and, only on rare occasion, meat. And because she has rheumatoid arthritis, she follows a regular fitness regimen that includes yoga, weight lifting and a stationary bicycle.

Although her idea of slowing down was recently stepping off the boards of KCET and USC / Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center, Thornton is on the boards of the Library Foundation, the Los Angeles World Affairs Council and the Los Angeles Music Center Opera, of which she’s a major supporter. Having served a seven-year term on the Library of Congress Trust Fund Board, she is also a member of the Library of Congress’ James Madison Council.

Opera is a particular love since Thorton studied voice and briefly sang professionally--as a soloist in churches and even briefly on Broadway--before she married. She also served on the board of the Santa Fe Opera.

It’s no wonder that Thornton announces with enormous pride, “I’m part of the enlightened era as far as women are concerned. I feel I am a person in my own right.”

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That at least partially explains her reluctance to dwell on life with Tex, or the seven grandchildren, the weekends in Montecito, the lifestyle that includes a full house staff.

Because Thornton is so guarded, one is compelled to ask whether she would have preferred giving anonymously.

“I always wonder why people do anonymous giving,” she replies. “I’m proud of my name. I think it sets an example. The partnership between the private sector and the public sector is so important. That’s the big cry in politics. When I first started with the Library of Congress, they wouldn’t dare go out and ask for money blatantly, and now they do.”

Even those close to Thornton say they don’t know the intimacies of her existence.

“She does not, shall we say, appear to be a gregarious person,” says Caroline Ahmanson, a friend of 40 years. “She’s a very understated person. She does things because she believes in what she’s doing. And she’s a genuine good friend. But it doesn’t have anything to do with being chummy-chummy and discussing private things. I’m the same way. Most independent people are.”

Thornton’s part eventually gave far more to the Central Library than the $25,000 check for which she was initially asked. Beyond money, she and Smith began calling their friends and bringing them downtown.

“Flora wanted members who were interested”--not just names, Smith says. “She’s not elitist at all. Anything but. She believes in accomplishments.”

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Flora Laney Thornton

Claims to fame: Founder of the Council of the Library Foundation; board member of the Library Foundation, Los Angeles World Affairs Council, St. John’s Hospital, Pepperdine University and the Los Angeles Music Center Opera; supporter of numerous other institutions, including Flora L. Thornton Community Health Education Program at St. John’s Hospital; the Flora L. Thornton Chair in Preventive Medicine at the USC School of Medicine, and the Charles B. Thornton Administrative Center at Pepperdine University. She and her late husband were founder-level donors of the Music Center and Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Family: Widow of Litton Industries owner and CEO Charles B. “Tex” Thornton; two sons, Charles B. Thornton Jr. and William Laney Thornton; seven grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

On why she champions the library: “I deplore the idea that American schoolchildren are measuring so poorly among industrialized countries. The library can help that to some extent.”

On supporting worthy causes: “It’s a concept of being responsible in making decisions and utilization of assets to the best advantage.”