Perry Whiting’s Ugly Divorce

Perry Whiting was the original owner of what we now know as Whiting Woods and is its namesake. He got part of the oak-covered canyon in the Verdugo Mountains at auction around 1916, after a house of prostitution was closed down there. He originally intended to flip the property but found he liked it there and soon purchased the rest of the wooded canyon.

Perry was a self-made millionaire, cashing in on the growth of Los Angeles. He bought, sold and traded in properties and building supplies. Living near downtown LA in his early years, his first marriage fell apart in 1913. He quickly rebounded with Lillie, a younger divorcee and in 1915 married her. He must have sensed things weren’t going well immediately as soon after the wedding he arranged a post-nuptial agreement in which he paid her $5,000 to forego any future monetary support she might seek.

Lillie desired a country house, so Perry fixed up the former La Crescenta prostitution house as a ranch home, and the couple moved in. According to Lillie in the 1920 divorce trial, the trouble started with her attempts to hang curtains in the new home. Perry didn’t like them and used profanity. Lillie professed herself a sensitive and refined woman, and that Perry’s use of profanity and his violent temper caused her mental suffering. She walked out for good in 1918 and, when she returned for her things, she found liquor bottles strewn about the house. The allegations spiraled downward from there.

Much of Lillie’s divorce suit had to do with Perry’s real or imagined attention to other women and, in one case, girls. According to Lillie, while she was away Perry threw a party attended by a woman and her two daughters, 14 and 16. Two of Perry’s employees at the ranch were called to testify. One testified that Perry was “pretty speedy” around the girls and that he had witnessed Perry dancing with and kissing the girls. Another employee testified that one of the young girls tried to seduce him; such was the nature of the people Whiting was associating with. Lillie went on to detail an instance in which she followed Perry in his car and witnessed him “spooning” with another very young woman. She also brought up that Perry employed a pretty woman chauffeur of whom Lillie was suspicious.

There was a dramatic courtroom scene in which Perry brought up the $1,000 worth of jewelry he had bought Lillie, which she was wearing in the courtroom that very day. Lillie dramatically stripped off her watch, necklace and rings and tossed them on the table. Whiting whipped out his checkbook, wrote her a check for $1,000 on the spot, and pocketed the jewelry.

Lillie was suing for mental cruelty. Perry’s attorney, in an interesting twist on the science of genetics, told the court that Perry’s prominent Roman nose “indicated that he was not angelic or saintly, and that Mrs. Whiting should not have expected it.”

After nearly three months of court haggling, the judge denied Lillie’s divorce suit, calling her allegations “trifling grievances.” Perry’s divorce counter-suit was granted and the couple made a clean break. Perry retreated to the Jonathan Club, a downtown LA men-only social club that provided bachelor accommodations. Perry wrote in his autobiography, “If more wives made their homes as inviting and peaceful as their husband’s clubs … there would not be so many divorces.”

He rebounded yet again with Marita, a widow, and they married in 1926. The original home in Whiting Woods had burned in 1921 so the newlyweds built a huge mansion on the opposite side of the canyon and lived there for several years. They divorced acrimoniously in 1940. Soon after, Perry was declared mentally unfit, and spent his last years as a patient at Camarillo State Mental Hospital. He died in 1953.

Whiting ends his 1930 autobiography: “I know that my childhood dream of winning riches and a happy home to enjoy in my old age has come true.” He did win the riches, but the last part of that dream was not to last.

  mike lawler