Teapot Dome Pitch Meeting: Edward Doheny, Albert Fall, and Cecil B. DeMille

In the fifth installment in an ongoing series, LARB founder Tom Lutz reflects on the convergence of politics and cultural power in early Hollywood.

By Tom LutzJune 12, 2025

• Film

• Politics

Editor’s Note: This is the fifth of 12 monthly articles on the centennial of 1925; some of it is excerpted from Tom Lutz’s 1925: A Literary Encyclopedia, which was published in March. For multimedia materials, see the website.

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AN UNLIKELY TRIO converged in Los Angeles in January 1925, when the oil magnate Edward Doheny invited Hollywood’s biggest director, Cecil B. DeMille, to meet with him and Albert B. Fall, the disgraced former secretary of the interior and New Mexico senator. DeMille was the most famous of the three, the director and producer of some 50 films already, at just 43, at the height of his fame and power. He was hot off the success of The Ten Commandments (1923), at that point one of the most celebrated (and expensive) films of all time.

Doheny, in his late sixties, was a shockingly wealthy international businessman. He had started the Southern California oil boom, sinking the first successful well in Los Angeles and some 300 further wells throughout the city. He also drilled the first oil well in Mexico. His Pan American Petroleum was one of the world’s biggest oil companies; by the 1920s, it had holdings in a half dozen countries and sales around the globe. Fall, also in his sixties, had resigned as secretary of the interior (under President Warren G. Harding) two years earlier and was under investigation for corruption. The key figure in what became known as the Teapot Dome scandal, he was accused of accepting bribes from Doheny in exchange for lucrative federal contracts. Doheny and Fall wanted DeMille to make a film that told the story of Teapot Dome from their side. DeMille agreed that there was a great story there.

Fall and Doheny had met many years earlier when they were both prospecting for silver near Kingston, New Mexico. After that, Doheny went on to pursue his oil career, while Fall became a rancher, attorney, and politician. Fall’s early career was marked by scandals of various kinds, as well as felonious activity up to and including murder, the evidence suggests. His real estate dealings were suspect—there are stories of his neighbors being terrorized and their houses burned down by Fall’s henchmen, after which he bought up their ranches at literal fire-sale prices, making his Three Rivers Ranch larger and larger. He is also suspected of ordering the assassination of prosecutor Albert Fountain and his eight-year-old son Henry. Fountain had indicted Fall and his gang of cattle rustlers, and they were considered responsible for many deaths. Fall had once personally shot at a deputy sheriff, his bullet passing through the deputy’s hat, while a member of his gang shot the deputy in the arm. As an attorney himself, Fall was an expert at manipulating the legal system and helped secure acquittals for any men who worked for him.

In 1896, Albert and Henry Fountain had traveled 150 miles to the courthouse in Lincoln, New Mexico Territory, to convene the grand jury that produced the indictments. He brought the boy with him on the theory that even these reprobates wouldn’t kill him in front of his young son. As he was leaving the courthouse after the indictments were read, he was slipped a note that said, “If you drop this we will be your friends. If you go on with it you will never reach home alive.” He started on the three-day trip home in a buckboard wagon, boarding the first night in Blazer’s Mill and the second in La Luz. In La Luz, he told his host that he was being followed, at a distance, by two men on horseback. Fountain and his son left that morning for the final stretch and were never heard from again. His empty wagon was found, the horses gone, and blood in the sand near it. Sometime-sheriff Pat Garrett, famous for shooting Billy the Kid, was brought in to investigate the apparent murders. He began arresting Fall’s associates, some after they had engaged in shoot-outs with Garrett and his deputies. Fall worked hard to get his henchmen released, acting as their attorney, and was assisted at the trial by Harry Daugherty, who would go on to serve alongside Fall in the Harding cabinet, as attorney general. (Daugherty was accused of orchestrating many of the crimes of the Harding administration, including bootlegging and bribery, but he was never charged or brought to trial.)

When the Fountain murder trial started, the defendants, Fall’s close associates Oliver Lee and James Gilliland, were supposedly being held in the Lincoln jail, but they had actually been out and about, doing what they could to undermine the case against them. Five prosecution witnesses disappeared, their bodies never found. Without the witnesses’ testimony, Lee and Gilliland were declared not guilty.

But all of that was local news. Fall’s national infamy was based on his tenure as Harding’s interior secretary, when, in exchange for massive “loans” from oilmen Doheny and Harry Sinclair, he awarded them no-bid contracts to extract oil from what were supposed to be military reserves on federal land at Teapot Dome, Wyoming, and Elk Hills and Buena Vista, California. As more and more of the story leaked out, congressional hearings began, and when the arrangements were made public, Fall—alone among the many crooks in the Harding administration—was pushed to resign. The case was still wending its way through the courts in 1925 when the meeting between DeMille, Doheny, and Fall was arranged.

Fall and Doheny maintained their innocence to the end, and Doheny was convinced that, with a proper public relations push, they could regain their good names, or at least mitigate the negative fallout. They hoped DeMille would tell their side of the story, which would be an uplifting, patriotic tale of personal heroism—two men coming together to bring neglected natural resources to market, to put money in the US Treasury, and to grow the economy and build the industrial capacity that the military would need if it ever went to war with—so the prevailing wisdom ran—an ever more aggressive Japan.

DeMille thought it was a great idea—he said later that it “would have made one of the most talked of motion pictures of the decade”—but the year before, he had left Paramount Studios following fights over production budgets with studio head Adolph Zukor. As a result, he needed to secure financing in New York, and when the financiers said no to the Doheny-Fall picture—it was too political, too hot, too controversial—the idea was shelved. Doheny’s next move, he decided, would be to make their case in book form. He hired a writer, Mark B. Thompson, a Las Cruces, New Mexico, attorney with literary ambitions, to write Fall’s life story. Doheny had experience hiring writers to produce magazine articles about him—Laton McCartney (who wrote the single best book on Teapot Dome) called them Doheny’s “well-compensated and imaginative biographers,” Thompson among them. Throughout the summer, Thompson and Fall worked on the book at Three Rivers Ranch, with Doheny paying them salaries for their work.

Meanwhile, Doheny sold much of his business to Standard Oil, keeping the California holdings but divesting the Mexican and Venezuelan fields, the East Coast and Gulf Coast refineries and pipelines, and 31 oil tankers. So, as Fall was struggling, Doheny was flush with cash.

Fall was famous for talking like a true westerner, with a drawl, colorful metaphors, and an excess of superlatives. He said he wanted to tell the story exactly as it happened, that he would tell the whole truth no matter the fallout, lawyers permitting. “[F]ollowing boldly and frankly my own ideas alone,” Fall wrote to a friend, he planned to tell the story “in the most open, frank manner possible, irrespective of objections.” They sent drafts of the work to Doheny in Los Angeles, and then, at the end of the year, Doheny pulled the plug.

Fall had wanted the biography to end with a full-throated defense of his role in the Teapot Dome leases, but Doheny, unlike Fall, was taking the advice of their attorneys on how to proceed. The attorneys told them that an open friendship between the two men could be construed as “continuing conspiracy” and counseled them to keep their distance from one another. Fall admitted that being an attorney himself had made it difficult to follow their advice. “Unfortunately,” as he wrote to one of the lawyers, “I practiced law for years and this experience probably unfitted me more or less for being a good client.” He also felt that the lawyers too often protected Doheny at his expense, which doesn’t sound far-fetched. Fall felt that their case was making him out to be “an old, broken-down imbecile, an object of charity, and [suggested] that I really had nothing whatsoever to do with the leases.” The lawyers were also not thrilled that Fall insisted on testifying in his own defense, which the lawyers were opposed to, not only on general grounds but also on specific ones—they were sure the prosecutors “would badger him till he blew up and made a mess of things.”

In February 1929, as the criminal prosecutions were coming to trial, Doheny’s son, Edward “Ned” Doheny Jr., and Ned’s chauffeur (and perhaps lover) Hugh Plunkett were found dead in the 46,000-square-foot Greystone Mansion that Doheny the elder had built for his son in Beverly Hills while they went through continued questioning by police and congressional investigators. Doheny and Plunkett had delivered a pile of the cash by hand, taking it by train in a suitcase from Los Angeles to Fall’s office in Washington, DC, so they were essential witnesses. Ned couldn’t be forced to testify against his own father, and the family was pressuring Plunkett to enter an insane asylum so that he wouldn’t be forced to testify either. Both men were shot and killed in what may have been a murder-suicide (but may have been a double murder) in the downstairs library that Ned (and perhaps Plunkett) had used as a bedroom. The case was corrupt. The police were not called until three hours after the shots were fired, and the Greystone staff all offered matching testimony that had clearly been coached. The official story became that Plunkett had gone mad and shot Doheny and then himself. Much of the physical evidence contradicted this. No serious investigation was ever conducted.

Eventually, Fall was convicted and Doheny acquitted (Sinclair was acquitted as well, but was fined and received six months for contempt of Congress). Fall was sentenced to a $100,000 fine and a year in prison. He was a broken man at that point, nearing 70 but looking 90, with heart problems (he had a stroke during the trial) and little money. When Doheny was acquitted again, in 1930, of offering the bribe that Fall was imprisoned for accepting, it was on the grounds that it was intended as a loan. Doheny demanded that the loan be paid back in full, the effect of which was that Fall lost the ranch he had so brutally and illicitly built. He died poor, disgraced, and friendless.

Doheny, after the trials were over and his son buried, became a recluse, though he made several magnificent donations—he was responsible for the St. Vincent de Paul Church in Los Angeles and the St. Edward the Confessor Church in nearby Dana Point, as well as the library at the University of Southern California (which still bears the name of his son). He also gifted the Doheny Mansion to Mount Saint Mary’s University and his land at Dana Point for what became Doheny State Beach.

In these same years, from 1925 to 1930, DeMille developed several new technologies as the industry transitioned to sound, and he produced 20 films, including The Volga Boatman (1926), based on the Konrad Bercovici novel; King of Kings (1927); The Angel of Broadway (1927); and Madame Satan (1930). He never made a film about the scandal.