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Fellow Student Norman Chandler, scion of the family that owned the Los Angeles Times, left college after Christmas in his senior year so that he could get started working on the paper and marry Dorothy. She quit at the end of her junior year without a qualm.
Not for Me. They had been married ten years and had two children, Camilla, 7, and Otis, 5, when Buff, as she had come to be called, became so depressed by what seemed to be the continued reluctance of the Chandler family to accept her that she took up residence for six months in a private psychiatric clinic in Pasadena run by Dr. Josephine Jackson, coming home for a visit about once a week. The therapy was an unqualified success. Says Buff: "I had begun to doubt myself, to feel that there was something wrong with me. Dr. Jackson helped me to see that Norman's family was not going to change or destroy me, nor was I going to change or destroy them."
With her new confidence, Buff found a new restlessness. Her children were more and more away at school. "I was not interested in the social life of Pasadena or in joining the bridge-playing. I knew it was not for me. I was still that little girl, believing when I woke up each day that life was running too fast."
Unexpected Volunteer. So Buff went to work for Children's Hospital of Los Angeles. The hospital management thought they were getting another halfhearted volunteer, but they didn't know Buff. She zeroed in on personnel problems. "It seemed to me everybody was underpaid." Before the management knew what had hit them, Buff confronted them with proposals for more days off, longer vacations, higher wages.
Then war came, and Norman was called by the Government to other jobs. He asked Buff to take over some areas of the Times, and she moved into the Times building, setting up a tiny, 1½-room apartment on the top floor. Typically, Buff enrolled in a ones-year journalism course at the University of Southern California, held beer bull-sessions for the newspaper staff every night, and reorganized the women's page from a narrow provincial society report to a far-ranging survey of all the arts from decoration to ballet.
Zeal & Budgets. Buff Chandler's public career really began, though, when Actor Jean Hersholt, president of the Hollywood Bowl, was impressed by her zeal on the board of the Southern California Symphony Association and persuaded her to join the board of the debt-ridden Bowl.
Buff was all for culture, but she also had an executive's eye for the balance sheet. Her first vote as a board member was to close the Bowl down. The Bowl closed. But typically, Buff had something more in mind. She enlisted the help of Conductor Alfred Wallenstein and devised a scheme to persuade headline musicians to play with the symphony in the Bowl without fees. In two weeks there were enough pledges to make up a whole season. The Bowl reopened and wound up with a tiny profit.
The Bowl was saved, but this still left the Los Angeles symphony without a hall of its own. Early in 1955, Buff called up her friend Grace Ford