The Fortunes of Dwight Whiting

Helen G. Woodbury’s financial support helped Hal Roach to set up the Rolin Film Company, but it didn’t keep the new enterprise going.

In 1915 Rolin was rescued by the work and the money of board member and production manager Dwight A. Whiting (1891–1974).

For background on Whiting, I’m indebted to the articles of Janet Whitcomb, chronicler of Lake Forest, California.

Dwight A. Whiting grew up in a wealthy Los Angeles family. His father, also named Dwight, had come out from Massachusetts and founded the town of Del Toro, which became Lake Forest. The patriarch was known for planting eucalyptus trees. He met his wife Emily at the Hotel del Coronado, where L. Frank Baum later spent some winters during his period of celebrity and wealth.

In the spring of 1907, when Dwight was fifteen years old, his father died suddenly. In this article Whitcomb quotes from a death notice in the 1 May 1907 Los Angeles Times:

Death resulted from injuries received on a Santa Fe train while Mr. and Mrs. Whiting were returning from Los Angeles from the El Toro ranch with a party of friends. Mr. Whiting was walking down the aisle of the car when the train gave a lurch and he was thrown against the corner of one of the seats, the impact causing internal hemorrhages. The accident at first was not considered a serious one, and a day or so after it occurred the injured man was able to make a trip to Santa Barbara, but while there he became much worse and returned to his home, where he soon died.

The same news story said the older man had left instructions about his son’s future: the boy “is to receive an education in this country especially fitting him as a specialist in forestry, and then is to receive a special course in the University of Leipzig, Germany.” In fact, the son attended Stanford University from 1910 to 1912.

Dwight Whiting came of age in 1912 and probably gained control of his inheritance then. There’s no sign that he went into forestry. Instead, two years later he was running an automobile dealership. In later life he was involved in ranching, banking, insurance, and oil. But in 1914 and 1915 Whiting was interested in the Rolin Film Company.

In this article, Whitcomb quotes from a 1989 newspaper clipping (which I can’t find elsewhere) based on an interview with Hal Roach—who wasn’t always exact when telling stories about events over half a century earlier. Roach said that as a trucker he was once “unloading logs at a ranch owned by Dwight Whiting” and thought it was “an ideal shooting area for cowboy films.” He said of Whiting:

He loaned me the $200 to produce my first film, a 30-minute western, and let me shoot it all on his property.

As Whitcomb notes, Roach didn’t recall accurate information about Whiting and Del Toro. This “cowboy film” can’t be identified. Was it indeed Roach’s first film? Was the $200 a loan or an investment, and was it actually $200? Details aside, Roach’s basic memory was that Dwight Whiting was an early backer of his moviemaking enterprise.

Whiting’s mother had remarried in 1911, and he and his brother worked to keep her hefty inheritance out of the hands of her new husband by setting up trusts and corporations. An IRS ruling about those entities contains the information that in 1917 Dwight Whiting was worth about $176,000. That was the equivalent of more than $4 million today. Whiting didn’t need his job at the Rolin Film Company. The company needed him.

Indeed, Richard Lewis Ward’s History of the Hal Roach Studios says that in its first few years “the company was chronically short of general operating funds, necessitating frequent requests for advances from Pathé and occasional excursions into Dwight Whiting’s personal resources.”

The same study quotes Whiting’s assistant manager Warren Doane writing to H. M. “Beanie” Walker (then a freelancer) about late payment in early 1918, “Should worst come to worst, Mr. Whiting will come to bat again and liquidate all that is against the Company”—i.e., pay off the bills from his personal funds.

But first, Whiting needed to find Rolin a distributor, any distributor.

TOMORROW: A pathetic situation.

(In the absence of any photograph of Dwight Whiting, I’m illustrating this post with a photo of 542 Lorraine Boulevard in LA. As explained here, this house was commissioned by Dwight’s younger brother George in 1920. After George’s marriage broke up, he sold it to Dwight in 1925. Then Dwight’s first marriage broke up, and he sold it in 1931.)