What we have here is a story that gets played out in half the households of the world at one time or another: Mother doesn’t approve of son’s choice of a mate.
So it is in the Smith household. “I’m stuck between two women who don’t like each other,” said Morton Smith. “It’s that simple.”
What makes this story not so simple is money-gobs of it. Specifically, the $350 million or so based on the great Irvine Ranch land bonanza; money that now compounds quietly in the bank account of 61-year-old Joan Irvine Smith.
When there’s a lot of money involved, can the supermarket tabloids be far behind? The Smith family feud has been splashed all over the pages of the National Enquirer, with tabloid TV panting not far behind. All because Joan Irvine Smith and her third son, Morton, 29, can’t agree on Marianne Campbell, 30, who works nights as a nurse in the children’s cancer ward at Long Beach Memorial Hospital.
Morton married Campbell Sept. 16 at nearby St. Mary’s church in Huntington Beach. His mother says she didn’t get an invitation. But the National Enquirer, and its 4.4 million inquiring minds, did get invited, by Morton Smith, who says he wanted to “shock” his mother.
The headline screamed: “He Gives Up $100 Million to Marry the Girl He Loves.”
His mother, the Enquirer reported, “looks down on her working-class background.”
Well, not quite.
Neither Morton nor Mom will own up to any alterations in the will. Morton says only that his mother threatened to disinherit him if he married the woman he loves.
“This has nothing to do with her (his wife’s) middle-class background,” said Joan Irvine Smith, who has dated and married plenty of working stiffs herself (husband No. 1 was a lifeguard; the second a flier; the third a contractor). “The men I married were working people, but they were gentlemen. They had a sense of decorum.”
Morton is the product of her fourth and longest-lasting marriage to Morton “Cappy” Smith, one of the finest horsemen in the nation, but a man who knows how to drive a tractor. They are divorced.
For the younger Morton, who abided for a time by his mother’s wishes, the turning point seems to have come with the death last year of his grandmother, noted Orange County, Calif., philanthropist Athalie Clarke. Morton believes his two stepbrothers were left decent inheritances by the grandmother, while he got a 1975 Mercedes “with 600,000 miles on it.”
“I didn’t get anything, just a damn car I can’t drive to the store,” he said. “The other guys (Joan’s other two sons) got taken care of. But I haven’t done what I was told to do. Toed the line. Played the game.”
His mother said she preferred to see her son work hard-and be rewarded later.
“He bragged to a lot of people that when his grandmother died he was going to be fixed for life,” Joan Irvine Smith said.
Working for an inheritance
Joan spent most of her life putting in 16-hour days, battling the Irvine Co. over the inheritance left her by her grandfather, James Irvine II. She said she expects her offspring to work hard too.
So young Morton Smith, the man who would be heir, now finds himself hawking mutual funds and other securities, living on $60,000 a year.
His bride says this doesn’t bother her a bit.
“My parents didn’t have a dime, and I’m happy,” she said. “I look at these rich families with all their dysfunctions, and it’s disgusting.”
An Irish-Italian Catholic woman from a working-class suburb of Boston, Campbell grew up the sixth of nine children. She worked as a waitress to pay her way through school.
“We were so poor, we couldn’t afford a color television,” she said, tossing a softball with Morton outside their apartment.
Morton Smith said he doesn’t care about losing his family money: “My mother doesn’t give anything away for free. It’s all on a string. Well, I’m too damn old and too damn proud to be taking it. I’d rather keep my dignity.”
Meanwhile, the tabloid story has set off a media jamboree. Morton Smith said he’s received inquiries from “Today,” “Eye to Eye With Connie Chung,” Maury Povich, Sally Jessy Raphael and “American Journal.”
Joan Irvine Smith is watching the circus with some amusement. One recent night, she sat in an armchair at her small, prefab house (“my plastic house,” she terms it) at The Oaks, a horse ranch and equestrian center in San Juan Capistrano, Calif. Six of her 10 Jack Russell terriers-Winny and Pooh, Skip and Sissy, and Nip and Tuck-took turns leaping on her lap. One slurped out of her water glass. Joan cackled.
“He’s acting like a jerk,” she said of her son. “I told him he can marry any woman he wants to marry, but you can’t force me to accept someone I can’t tolerate. I don’t consider the young woman a lady.”
Off on the wrong foot
Joan Irvine Smith and the young woman did not get off to a wonderful start.
Joan said she stumbled upon Morton and his girlfriend in the bedroom of his grandmother’s house in Newport’s tony Belcourt one morning about seven years ago. They were, she said, in a state of dishabille.
Her son, who lived part time in the Belcourt house while he was traveling for ABC Sports, said he didn’t recall whether this happened: “Could have been, but I doubt it.” At any rate, he said, she never opened the door.
Joan Irvine Smith’s impression didn’t seem to recover from this first meeting. Joan said she cringed when Campbell would toss a football with Morton in the middle of a conservative Belcourt street, dressed only in “a scanty bikini with strings to tie it together.”
Then Campbell showed up at The Oaks in the fashion of the day: blue jeans ripped in the rear end. Morton said that, indeed, the jeans “were split at the hamstrings,” but they didn’t actually reveal anything. Campbell said she had taken the precaution of wearing a body stocking.
“I’ve got to do something about getting this child some clothes,” Joan told her mother and carted her future daughter-in-law off to Rodeo Drive, where a stunned Campbell was told to pick out thousands of dollars worth of Hermes and Gucci suits, bags and dresses. Joan Irvine Smith says she made it clear that she was buying her an outfit to wear for Christmas dinner with the family.
“It was wild. It was like that scene in `Pretty Woman,’ ” Campbell said. “Mrs. Smith took me on an amazing shopping spree. She spent a lot of money on me, but the styles were far beyond my sophistication level.”
Joan harrumphed.
“`Pretty Woman’ wanted to improve,” she said. “Marianne never wanted to improve.”
“Improve? What is she, a lab rat?” huffed Morton Smith.
“I always felt her attitude was: `Nobody can tell me what to do,’ ” Joan Irvine Smith said, although she does hand Campbell this: “She’s a hard worker.”
Campbell said her mother-in-law had given her a new sense of style and insisted she didn’t understand that the new outfits were meant for Christmas dinner; they seemed too “businesslike” to Campbell. So Joan’s mother gave her some money to pick out a Christmas dress.
A verbal undressing
She selected a short, black and white checkerboard knit number, Joan said, with a back plunge so low that one could count all her vertebrae.
“It was a little racy,” Morton Smith recalled.
A verbal undressing ensued, putting a damper on the holiday cheer.
A few Christmases later, the three sons stood up to make their annual toasts to their mother. When Morton’s turn came, Campbell apparently leaned over and said something to the effect of: “Morton, stop brown-nosing your mother.” Campbell disagrees on the quote’s exact wording, but concedes she said something similar.
“I never intended to offend Mrs. Smith, and if I did, I apologize,” Campbell said.
“This was after five milk punches and God knows how many glasses of wine, and she didn’t make the comment to anyone but me,” Morton said.
The whole affair raced toward a date in April, when Morton and his mother paced across the garden patio at The Oaks.
“I’m going to marry her,” Morton declared. They’d set the date-mistakenly, Morton Smith said-for the same time as his mother’s spring Oaks Classic, a horse-jumping competition.
“For as long as you’re married to her you’ll be welcome in my house. She will not,” Joan remembers telling him.
Morton, who hasn’t spoken to his mother since, questioned how his mother and father had the right to determine his happiness in marriage “with seven marriages between them.”
His wife, he said, knows him better than his parents.
“My father doesn’t know me from Adam,” Morton said. “You know who raised me? Boarding school raised me.”
“That’s baloney,” said Joan; she said his father visited Morton Jr. nearly every weekend.
“I was this major head case at that school. I was so screwed up,” Morton said. “Half the school was from Mexico, and I got left there longer than anyone (at vacations).”
His father, Cappy, said Morton was a good kid. “He was the cutest little kid you ever saw. But he grew up.” Cappy said he had a hard time convincing Morton of the value of the work ethic; his son only wanted to party.
Morton met Campbell while the two were attending the University of Rhode Island. “I was attracted to her because our arguments were so good,” Morton said.
Both Joan Irvine Smith and her son agree: They’re alike in many ways. Both headstrong. Both bright. Both stubborn.
Joan said she had a close relationship with her son, until he met Campbell.
Campbell said her mother-in-law thinks she’s driving a wedge between a mother and a son. But it’s she, Campbell said, who’s always urged Morton to call his mother, to send her a birthday card.
“There’s times I just cry about being rejected by this family,” Campbell said. “I work with children who have cancer. The children who survive are those who have family support. Family and God are No. 1 to me, and I’m not going to give up. I’ll not give up. I’ll help Morton bridge the gap.”
Fortunes and misfortunes of the Irvine family
– 1864: James Irvine, a Scots-Irish immigrant who came to California on a boat through the Panama Canal and made his fortune selling supplies to miners during the Gold Rush, buys 120,000 acres of the future Orange County at about 75 cents an acre. Old Spanish families, forced to sell cheaply because grazing land was decimated by a drought, can’t afford legal fees defending their titles.
– 1886: After nearly losing the ranch in an auction, James Irvine II comes into his inheritance. He moves the family from San Francisco to the ranch, and transforms the land into an agricultural empire.
– 1933: Athalie Anita Irvine Smith is born to James Irvine III and his second wife, Athalie Richardson. The girl’s father dies when she is 2. A willful child, at 4 she changes her name to Joan after a nursery rhyme.
– 1937: James Irvine II puts 51 percent of the company stock into a charitable foundation.
– 1947: James Irvine II is found floating dead in a trout stream, and his granddaughter, Joan, cries foul play.
– 1957: At 24, Joan Irvine joins the Irvine Co. board. She moves the company out of agricultural into development and convinces a hostile board that giving away land for the University of California-Irvine makes sense.
– 1959: Joan’s uncle, Myford Irvine, turns up dead, a shotgun wound in his gut and a pistol bullet in his head. The coroner says it’s suicide; others still believe it was murder.
– 1969: Joan persuades the U.S. Congress and Senate to change a law, forcing the foundation to sell its stock in the company. Now half the company is for sale. Joan scurries to find a buyer; the foundation courts Mobil Oil.
– 1977: Joan joins a consortium with shopping-center developer Al Taubman, investor Charles Allen, Henry Ford II and Donald Bren, to outbid Mobil Oil. She sells her 22 percent interest for $72 million and 11 percent of the stock in the new company.
– 1982: Joan sells her remaining interest, but quarrels in the courtroom with developer Bren about the worth of her stock for nearly a decade. Settles with her mother for $255.8 million in 1991.
– 1990s: Joan begins spending part of her inheritance to develop The Oaks, an equestrian center in San Juan Capistrano, Calif. She donates millions to UCI, and founds and funds the National Water Research Institute and the Irvine (Calif.) Museum.
