Force of Nature

It was a coming out, of sorts, although few of the 600 people crowded into the Corona del Mar elementary school auditorium sensed it on that fateful evening in mid-January 2001. To the seasoned (and probably cynical) observer, it was just another public hearing on yet another Orange County development plan. The “not-in-my-backyard” folks would protest; the environmentalists would squawk; then the public servants would depart and, soon thereafter, the bulldozers would rumble again.

The project in question was a deal struck quietly during the Wilson administration’s waning days to demolish the old termite-riddled beach cottages in Crystal Cove State Park, to be replaced by new cottages that would rent for $375 a night. The developer, Michael Freed, had impeccable environmental chops--he had created the Post Ranch resort in Big Sur, and if you could build there, well, you had to figure you could build just about anywhere.

But Freed and his political allies had made a mistake, although they would have needed an exquisitely subtle understanding of Orange County history to anticipate it. They had decided to build in the childhood playground of one of the county’s most eccentric, irascible, implacable and energetic citizens, one of the last Orange Countians who had actually lived the area’s fabled, bucolic, undeveloped past--an era of immense land-holdings lorded over by bigger-than-life ranching dynasties; the Orange County of oranges, for heaven’s sake; of cattle and country roads and unspoiled beaches.

Michael Freed hadn’t figured on crossing Joan Irvine Smith.

And now, here she was, standing to voice her displeasure at what this interloper was proposing to do to Crystal Cove as the crowd thundered, “Joan, Joan, Joan.” Somehow, in the hullabaloo, Freed never got a chance to speak. By the end of the evening, it was clear that two things had happened:

Michael Freed’s resort was dead as a doornail.

And Joan Irvine Smith was back where she has been, on and off, for four tumultuous decades: in the headlines and in the thick of battle.

Now the stakes in another ongoing development battle have sharply escalated both for Smith and those who seem certain to cross paths, if not swords, with her. She predicts, “There’s going to be a real battle down here with respect to development in the south part of the county.” At issue is a plan developed by the Rancho Mission Viejo Co. that would put 14,000 houses on a prime cut of land on the historic O’Neill Ranch, a spread not quite as big as her great-grandfather’s 120,000 acres right next door and a few miles up the serpentine Ortega Highway from Smith’s own horsy estate in San Juan Capistrano.

“These people are good, close friends of mine,” she says. “I’m a tenant of theirs. I’ve told Tony [Moiso, who runs the company that owns and manages the O’Neill Ranch] on more than one occasion--you’ve got to go in and study this thing and have a balance. You’ve got to work with these environmental communities, because they’ll tie you up in court a long time.”

The lady should know: she spent more than 30 years in court with the various overlords of her family’s Irvine Ranch. But now, fresh from the Crystal Cove coup, Smith sees herself as a player who can bring these intractable, warring enemies to the table, bang some sense into their heads. “I think we’re going to change the world here,” she says, with not a hint of doubt. “We’re going to have a balance between the environmental community and the development community. We’re going to change everything.”

Rebecca Schoenkopf, one of the OC Weekly’s acid-tongued columnists, sees it differently, as do others around the county. “That’s a little bit bizarre coming from an Irvine,” Schoenkopf says. “That’s where she got all of her money, isn’t it? Didn’t her family pave over all of Orange County? Isn’t that pretty much how it happened?”

As with all things Irvine, it is--and, then again, it isn’t.

To understand Joan Irvine Smith--to understand Orange County--you need to grasp the immensity, the pervasiveness of the original Irvine Ranch, which encompassed more than 185 square miles of the county and reached 22 miles inland from Newport Beach to the edge of the Cleveland National Forest. Consider how Los Angeles might be a very different place if one man had owned fully a quarter of its surface area--and if, over the years, through all the twists and turns of ownership, the land was still owned by one man. It might make the entire West Side of the city look like--well, like Irvine. Or the Newport Coast, where the current owner’s fancy for Italian Renaissance hill towns has created a cleaned-up Urbino-on-the-Pacific.

The ranch was first assembled in 1864 from the tatters of drought-stricken Mexican rancheros by James Irvine (two partners were quickly bought out), a taciturn immigrant Scots-Irishman who made his first pile selling supplies to the plungers rushing through San Francisco during the Gold Rush. Irvine thought it would make a fine place to pasture sheep for his wool operation, though there’s no evidence he saw the land before he bought it.

The land-holdings inevitably became something more than that. His son, James II, applied the magic elixir--water--and transformed the sleepy ranch into an agricultural powerhouse incorporated as The Irvine Co. He also made a colossal mistake, transferring control of the ranch to The James Irvine Foundation. It left daughter Joan Irvine Smith and her mother, Athalie Clarke, minority shareholders. That’s when the trouble began as, over the years, the foundation’s ownership was replaced by a gaggle of Eastern moguls (among them Henry Ford II), then, in a masterpiece of financial legerdemain, by its current owner, Donald Bren.

Joan Irvine Smith fought them all. In 1990, she (and her mother) cashed out for $256 million, severing her last legal ties with the ranch. In 1994, she was listed at 341 on the Forbes magazine list of richest Americans, with a fortune of $350 million. Now she says, “I’m way below” that figure and “happy” to be off the list. The money has been spread among dozens of projects: art, horses, a foundation, books--the woman is, if nothing else, busy-busy-busy.

At first sight, her good works seem like the high-priced hobbies of the Very Rich. But a second glance reveals an internal logic that, as always, tracks back to the land and its inexorable hold on this energetic, blunt-speaking 68-year-old.

One example: Last fall, Mrs. Smith (everyone around her calls her that and only that) made an appearance at the Thermond Clarke Library (named for her stepfather) at Chapman University in Orange. The occasion: publication of “California: The Golden Land of Promise,” co-written by Smith and Jean Stern, executive director of the Irvine Museum, which was created by Smith and is devoted to her pervasive sense of preserving, if only on canvas, the vision of a long-ago Eden. The 5 1/2-pound, $50 tome, once conceived modestly as the outgrowth of a pamphlet put out for a local celebration, quickly burgeoned into the first volume in a projected trilogy, its 365 pages sprinkled lavishly with full-color illustrations (many drawn from Smith’s lode of 4,000 plein-air paintings).

The book ends with the founding of the Irvine Ranch, which gets 30 pages of ink compared with 20 for the Gold Rush. It’s a lavish coffee-table volume, one that a decorator might arrange precisely next to a potted phalenopsis. Smith’s goal for the book, though, fits perfectly with her messianic zeal--the same impulse, as it turns out, that led her to buy all of that art, create the museum and issue 11 books on California painting since 1992. “It’s a soft-sell to preserve the environment,” she says. “It’s been my hope that eventually, in time, in some way, this art will be helpful in building some sort of bridge between the development community and the environmental community.”

Smith doesn’t just plan to drop the book into the local Barnes & Noble store. Instead she muses that “maybe every school could have a book and have CDs that kids could learn from.”

James Doti, president of Chapman University in Orange, says, “We’re working on the possibility of doing that,” adding, “I know that Mrs. Smith is already working with educators and asking them questions about how it might best be done. She’s not working in a vacuum and saying, ‘Let’s just do it this way and foist it on the schools.’ ”

A $50 book in every California school? Talk to Joan-watchers in Orange County and they’ll agree with museum director Jean Stern: “She knows exactly what she wants and she’s willing to pay for it.” Which puts the following conversation into a certain perspective. Smith is seated in the living room of one of her houses at The Oaks, her 22-acre equestrian center along San Juan Creek. A Guy Rose plein-air painting hangs over the fireplace (it’s probably worth a million, Stern estimates), dozens of images of horses and things equestrian scattered about, including a photo of a younger Joan draped gracefully over the neck of a powerful jumper in flight. A visiting reporter observes: “If you look back on your great-grandfather’s era, these were gigantic people. They seemed to think big.”

“Real big!” says the heiress, a wry smile spreading across her outdoorsy, no-makeup visage.

“I wonder if that’s possible anymore,” muses the writer.

There is a long pause. Then, quietly, the smile widening, the heiress says: “I think big,” punctuating it with a laugh.

The record of big thinking is plainly there, writ large in deeds that hardly begin to relate the impact of her philanthropy:

* Smith’s lobbying for a master plan for the Irvine Ranch led (for better or worse) to the creation of Irvine, the city, and the donation of 1,000 acres for UC Irvine, where a building is named for her and she has given $1 million for atmospheric research and $2 million for the medical school, among other largesse.

* Her founding of the Joan Irvine Smith & Athalie R. Clarke Foundation, which has bankrolled countless good works, including $1 million for UCI’s Reeve-Irvine Research Center to search for a cure for spinal cord injuries, such as the one that paralyzed actor Christopher Reeve (one reason she became so enamored of Reeve, she says, is because Reeve refused to allow family members to shoot the horse from which he fell).

* She created the National Water Research Institute, a consortium of Southern California water and sanitation districts that funds studies on water use, recycling and technology--the third-largest water research agency in the U.S.

The list of her beneficiaries goes on: the museum in Irvine (put together after a two-year, $15-million art-buying binge that one critic called a “fury”); her horse ranch The Oaks, where, until recent years, she hosted The Oaks Classic, jumper-horse charity events noted for their lavish presentations for the Land Rover set, as well as the 1999 Olympic equestrian trials. She also owns a 42-acre breeding facility near Escondido, plus a 250-acre estate in old-money hunt country near Middleburg, Va.

And yet there is an inevitable “and yet” about Smith. This is the woman who, at one point in her legal battle with the ranch’s owners, slept with a 12-gauge shotgun, traveled with bodyguards and changed homes frequently. Who obsessively banged out letters and reports--sometimes as much as 200 pounds a day--to city officials and Irvine Co. management. In 1987, an Orange County Register profile characterized her as “once a social gadabout, increasingly tagged as a reclusive eccentric.”

Even the creation of her museum drew flak: “I feel like cursing the well-meaning people who brought this once-obscure work [plein-air landscape painting] back into the public eye,” wrote a former Los Angeles Times art critic. (“I don’t care. So what?” says Smith about the carping.)

Then there was the matter of the nasty and very public battle with her youngest son, Morton, over his choice of bride. Smith disapproved and threatened to disinherit him. Morton responded by inviting the National Enquirer to the wedding and appearing on the “Today” show, creating, his mother complained, a “public spectacle.” (Now Smith says she and Morton are “having a great time” and have patched up the spat.)

Other eyebrow-lifters: Smith’s accusation against parties unknown that they had injected her top breeding stallion, South Pacific, with a rare and deadly parasite. She offered a $10,000 reward to find the culprit; thus far it’s uncollected. Then she got new headlines by offering two smallish Laguna seaside lots for $40 million (so far, no takers). One impeccable observer of Orange County’s rich lauds her philanthropies and lavish tastes, then quietly wonders, as if the KGB is on the line, if perhaps she is “crazy.” Another says that dealing with Smith is like “walking on eggshells.”

Fern Pirkle, head of the Friends of the Irvine Coast, which has long battled the Irvine Co., joins other county Joan-watchers in wondering what’s behind the facade. “Well, one wonders, doesn’t one?” Pirkle muses. “There’s always been suspicion about her motives.” Smith agrees. “Anything I do, people are skeptical,” she says, although she betrays little concern. As she’s fond of saying, “That’s the way the mop flops.”

Talk to Smith and you’re immediately struck by her extraordinary memory--one acquaintance calls it “almost photographic”--for names, circumstances, who worked for which law firm, who was an ally or (more likely) an enemy. She has a Byzantine scholar’s appreciation for double-dealing, under-the-table alliances, treachery, lies.

She flips through a card table-sized scrapbook filled with dozens of yellowing newspaper clippings, most detailing her battles with the old local bulls and Eastern tycoons who so consistently, so disastrously, underestimated the heiress.

But, in truth, there wasn’t much in her background back in the far-simpler times of the 1950s to warn the grizzled gents that this beautiful, athletic blond, hair worn in the de rigueur Republican flip, would be so much trouble.

She nearly died at birth, surviving only after an emergency transfusion. Her father, James Irvine III, known as Jase, had contracted tuberculosis, so Joan was turned over to her maternal grandparents and a nanny named “Dear-dear.” Two years later, Jase died. His daughter had been christened Athalie, but at 4, she unilaterally changed her name to Joan, taking her cue from a Mother Goose rhyme: “Here am I/Little jumping Joan/When nobody’s with me/I’m always alone.”

She spent her childhood on ritzy Oakhurst Drive in Beverly Hills. “I had to go to Shirley Temple’s birthday party every year,” Smith recalls. “I hated it.” The boy next door, Joel Rapp, remembers young Joan constantly badgering him to build forts and climb trees higher than he wanted to go. “She was a tough little tyrant,” he recalls.

Later she attended Westridge, a private girl’s school in Pasadena, where classmates noted her passion for low-cut dresses and “liquid luaus.” She made her debut with the prestigious Las Madrinas in Los Angeles, which funds research programs at Children’s Hospital and sponsors debutante balls for its volunteers. She tried college--Marymount in Los Angeles, then UC Berkeley--but she didn’t finish her freshman year. She took private art lessons with Alberto Vargas, the famous World War II pin-up artist. With a fortune estimated at $125 million, she quickly caught the attention of the national media, which dubbed the horsewoman the “rugged little rich girl.”

She lived a fairy-tale life, dancing until dawn at Maxim’s de Paris; haunting Rodeo Drive boutiques, vacationing at the Royal Hawaiian. At 19, she married lifeguard Charles Swinden: they had one son, James, but the marriage didn’t last. She then met a handsome Navy pilot, Russell Penniman, while spearfishing near the family cove in Laguna Beach. With Penniman, she soared over the Andes in a single-engine Cessna, slept in Amazon huts, hunted water buffalo and photographed the adventure for Sports Illustrated. The marriage produced a second child, Russell, but the union lasted less than three years. A third marriage, to contractor Richard Burt, a former Laguna Beach High School football star, also proved short-lived.

She later met Morton “Cappy” Smith, a gentleman farmer, internationally known horseman and master of the hunt in Middleburg, Va. Smith, 19 years her senior, recalled, “I was the only person who set limits for her.” After 12 years, the marriage foundered. Smith says it might have lasted “if I hadn’t been involved in so much litigation and traveling.”

During her childhood summers, Joan had been dispatched to the ranch. “I had to go with my grandfather whether I wanted to or not,” she recalls. “It was a forced march. He wanted me there.”

She was “in awe” of him. “He was a hard worker and a hard man. He ran his house and his company like a feudal court. He’d like to make sure you were tough.” When little Joan crawled up to the piano as her grandfather was playing, he would step on her fingers. “The longer I wouldn’t cry, the better he’d like it,” she remembers. A sign over Irvine’s roll-top desk read: “Often the best way to show warm sympathy is with cold cash.”

In June 1957, at age 24, Joan Irvine appeared at her first meeting of The James Irvine Foundation board. She brought attorney Howard Friedman along (board members refused to allow him into the meeting room). And then she demanded that the ranch’s manager step down.

“I’d known Joan since she was a baby,” foundation chairman N. Loyall McClaren said later. “When she first came on the board, I thought she’d be easy to handle. But from the beginning, we got absolutely nowhere. She was pretty spoiled. From the time Joan was able to comprehend things, she was raised by her mother and stepfather to believe she was the only person with the brains to run this great project.”

Smith agreed. In one of her letters to McClaren, which she leaked to the press, she wrote, “I am an Irvine. You are not. Consequently, the present and future welfare of the company is a matter of deep personal concern to me.”

The issue quickly became the ranch’s development--or lack of it. Orange County, by the early ‘60s, was exploding, all except the little farm village of Irvine, with its bean warehouse, post office and general store. “Last time I counted noses, there were 41 residents. That’s one less than we had 10 years ago,” Bill Cook, manager of the Orange County Bean & Grain Growers Assn., said in 1964.

Joan Irvine wanted to change that. She lobbied for donating 1,000 acres for a new University of California campus (it was hardly altruism; she knew how Westwood had boomed after UCLA opened). She demanded that a master plan be developed and supported hiring a first-class architect, William Pereira. When she felt she was being cut out of a land deal, she threatened to liquidate the company. She learned how to play the press, making reporters shareholders for a day so they could gain access to private meetings. She staged rallies.

Smith went to Washington and lobbied “for eight or nine years.” It worked. A clause in the Tax Reform Act of 1969 essentially forced the Irvine Foundation to dump its stock in the ranch. They responded by secretly courting Mobil Oil, a move that brought Smith and her mother back into court--and secret negotiations of their own. In 1977, Smith sold her 22% interest for $72 million and 11% of a new company bankrolled by high-profile investors Henry Ford II, New York investment banker Charles Allen and shopping center tycoon Alfred Taubman, who bought the Irvine Co. from The James Irvine Foundation. There was a fourth partner: a young local developer named Donald Bren.

He, too, had grown up in Hollywood (the son of actress Claire Trevor), but there the resemblance ended. Within a year, tensions again began to mount between Smith and the new board. She was removed from the executive committee and blocked once again from direct access to the company. By 1983, the situation had become so acrimonious that Smith simply wanted out. Bren offered to buy her stock, but she wanted $330 million, three times more than he was willing to pay. So began another epic legal battle.

In 1990, a Michigan court referee (where the Irvine Co. was incorporated) awarded Joan and her mother $256 million. Irvine Co. attorney William B. Campbell said it was “pretty much a clean sweep for us.” Smith retorted, “I don’t see Donald has such a great victory.”

Now the woman who once fumed that Bren is a “damned liar” says of the famously reclusive chairman’s efforts at environmental preservation, “I’m very pleased with what Donald’s doing. I don’t have any quarrel with Donald. He paid me. I’m not mad at Donald and I think Donald’s done a good job.” Then she bestows the ultimate accolade: “Donald is doing what I would have done.”

Informed of the kind words, a source from within the Irvine Co. says that the chairman respects Smith--and their argument was never personal, just business.

Which brings us back to Joan Irvine Smith’s newest--and oldest-- battle: the land. And the question that even Smith grants is “interesting”: whether she has the diplomatic skills to “herd cats,” as she puts it, and bring together the parties divided over the proposed Rancho Mission Viejo Co. project and other development vs. preservation issues. On that score, the results are mixed.

“I watched it happen [with Crystal Cove],” says Chris Evans, executive director of the United States operation of the Surfrider Foundation. “I remember a particular meeting, I will never forget it. There was an issue that many environmental groups in the county had disparate opinions about--and, of course, that’s one way that things all kinda go to hell.

“She just basically invited them all over to the ranch, packed them in a room--a little like Al Capone--and said, ‘Hey, let’s find out if there’s some piece of music we can all start playing at the same time.’ After that meeting, which she chaired, it was clear that there was a page we could all get on.”

Others in the fractious environmentalist community see Smith’s presence a little differently. “Some people really resented her [holding the meetings],” says Pirkle, of Friends of the Irvine Coast. “The state parks people are pretty sensitive to this, and they’ve asked me many questions, like, ‘Do you think people resent her? Do you think she’s taken it over too completely?’ And I’ve given them the same answer--that she does tend to take things over, but as far as I can tell it’s all for the best.”

Now the formidable Joan Irvine Smith gaze turns toward the O’Neill Ranch, those 14,000 houses. “In my conversations with Tony Moiso and Richard O’Neill, every opportunity I get I tell [them] no matter what [they] build, going up this Ortega Highway, with all these oak trees and so forth, nobody is going to be happy about it.” Later she adds: “I have a good rapport with these people and I can talk with them and tell them the same thing I told Donald [Bren], that when you look back with respect to the various land developers, how many of them do you really remember? Their great legacies will be what they can set aside in open space for future generations.”

Richard O’Neill, Smith’s friend, has a reply. “This ranch is the mother of all open space.” And, later, “I agree with her. So what? You have to develop [some of the ranch] for the partners to get their money out of it.”

It all comes down to--what did the equestrienne call it? Balance. Nice when you maintain it. Ugly when you fall.

*

Richard E. Cheverton last wrote for the magazine about typography designers. Laura Saari is a Santa Ana-based freelance writer.