-Caveat Lector-
an excerpt from:
The Right People - A Portrait of the American Social Establishment
Stephen Birmingham�1958, 1959, 1960, 1961, 1962, 1964, 1965, 1968
Little, Brown and Company
BostonoTronronto
LCCN 68-11525
360pps. � out-of-print
-----
2
Was It Ever What It Used to Be?
0F course there are very few women in Society today who lead the sort of life
that was led, just a couple of dozen years ago, by Mrs. Edward T. Stotesbury.
She received, as wedding presents from her husband, the senior Morgan partner
in Philadelphia, a simple $100,000 diamond-and-sapphire necklace and
$4,000,000 in cash to make up for it. She enjoyed such luxuries as a flotilla
of maids who were in charge of nothing but her clothes. Every afternoon Mrs.
Stotesbury would summon her wardrobe staff � who arrived carrying massive
costume books and catalogues of jewelry � to help her decide what to wear for
dinner. Even such a seemingly small task as deciding which diamond bracelet
to wear, can, when one has sixty-five, take time.
Mrs. Stotesbury's way of life, people in Society often point out, is one that
has gone the way of all 1040 forms. But it was fairly uncommon even in her
own day. Her parties were criticized as being a touch garish. A generation or
so earlier, the famous Bradley-Martin ball � where the hostess appeared in a
twenty-foot-long train, a crown, and $100,000 worth of diamonds on her
stomacher alone and Mrs. Astor managed to support $200,000 worth on her head
� drew so much criticism in the international press that the Bradley-Martins
exiled themselves to England forever. Mrs. Stotesbury's guests did not
overlook the fact that her husband had been nothing but a six-dollar-a-week
clerk before becoming one of the country's richest men. And, even at the peak
of her career as America's most spectacular hostess, Mrs. Stotesbury was not
considered a bona fide member of Society. Even so she has become, today, a
more or less permanent constellation in the social firmament. Some people
insist that it takes at least three generations for a family, starting with
nothing but money, to elevate itself to the highest Society. (Given another
three generations' time, it is also said, the same family will fritter its
way back to the ash heap.) Mrs. Stotesbury proves that an individual can be
elected to Society posthumously.
Mrs. Stotesbury's children � one is the former wife of the late General
Douglas MacArthur, and the other a former husband of Doris Duke � lead lives
of comparative quiet and obscurity, as do other members of other families
whose wealth once glittered in the public eye. The descendants of Belmonts
and Goulds and Goelets, of Biddles and Bakers and John Wanamakers have, as
real estate taxes have gone up, moved from brownstone and marble palaces on
Fifth Avenue and Rittenhouse Square, into apartments; here they achieve a
certain anonymity. The offspring of Astors, Gardners, Vanderbilts, Fishes,
Harrimans and Iselins can be found in made-over gardeners' cottages on
country estates. A number of Society people are, very quietly, doing
something that formerly would have been thought very odd indeed: they live in
places like Newport and Tuxedo Park, year round. ("The season here," says one
Tuxedo butler discreetly, "is now from January first to December
thirty-first.")
But are our great Society families languishing for lack of funds? Let us not
weep too bitterly for them. Taxes may have scaled down some families' living
habits. Quite a number of Society families are, comparatively speaking, poor.
But a number of others are just as rich as their grandfathers were, or even
richer. The late Vincent Astor, for instance, who inherited $87,200,000 in 19
12, increased his fortune � right through the Great Depression � to the point
where it amounted to $200,000,000 by the time he died in early 1959.
Money may be spent in less conspicuous ways than in making a woman topheavy
with precious stones, but it is still spent. Mrs. J. Denniston Lyon of New
York, for instance, who only recently was gathered to her ancestors, spent it
on her tiny Pekingese, Peaches. Peaches had been trained to relieve himself
in Mrs. Lyon's garden in her country place on the North Shore of Long Island.
In winter, lest Peaches be confused or disturbed by the move back to Fifth
Avenue, Mrs. Lyon directed her butler to make weekly trips out to Long
Island. There he spaded up a square of Long Island lawn and returned with it
to New York for Peaches. Peaches indeed was so particular that though he
loved to eat caramel candies, he would only eat the imported Italian ones
sold at the expensive food shop Maison Glass. Mrs. Lyon, among other
expenses, maintained a yacht anchored off Palm Beach. A year-round staff of
five was required for its maintenance. When its owner died she had not sailed
the boat, or set foot upon it, for fully fifteen years. Her house in Aiken,
South Carolina, stood similarly unvisited, though the house was ritually
opened at the beginning, and closed at the end, of each Aiken "season." "And
it was not," says one member of the family, "an easy house to open and close.
The silver and the paintings had to be taken out of the vault and then put
back again � that sort of thing."
Nearby, a neighbor of Mrs. Lyon's, Mrs. Dorothy Killiam, had an extraordinary
swimming pool constructed. Of average width, it was of surprising length �
appearing like a long, blue canal through the garden. This was because,
though its owner liked to swim, she disliked having to turn around. Taking
her architect to Palm Beach one winter, she waded into the sea and began to
swim along the shore. When she tired, she emerged, and said, "Measure it off.
That's how long I want my swimming pool to be." For parties, a hundred and
fifty guests for a sit-down dinner was not uncommon, and in summer � since
North Shore weather could not be relied upon � she had tables set for a
hundred and fifty in the house as well as out of doors. At the last minute,
then, she could decide where to sit her party. To place the centerpiece over
the largest table, her houseboy used to swing from a large, thick rope, slung
from an overhanging cave above her terrace. Cleaning Mrs. Killiam's massive
plunge was a chore tantamount to mowing John Nicholas Brown's lawn at
Newport. Because the lawn slopes at a forty-five-degree angle into the water,
gardeners and their mowers must be lashed with heavy ropes from the crest of
the rise lest men and machines be plunged into Narragansett Bay.
The servant problem is, of course, a problem. It is certainly no longer
possible to acquire a "good, honest, healthy and well-trained chambermaid"
for twenty dollars a month, as a 1914 advertisement in the New York Times put
it. It sometimes seems as though there are no well-trained chambermaids at
any price. "It isn't the upper class that's dying out, it's the servant
class," says a New York lady, anxiously eyeing her courtly, but creaky,
majordomo. Mrs. George Roberts of Philadelphia has said, with a good deal of
accuracy, "The only good servant is a person who thinks it's nice to be a
servant. Nowadays people simply don't think that being a servant is a nice
way to earn a living." As a result of this, there are Society people who
still live in houses with rooms for twenty servants and yet have to pick up
and deliver their maids each day. Many live in houses with private
switchboards, and answer their own telephones. Some who maintain boxes at the
Opera must hire sitters in order to attend.
On the rolling acres of Penllyn, Pennsylvania, there are a number of imposing
houses which, as a matter of family pride, the present generation of
Philadelphia's distinguished Ingersoll family is determined to keep up. The
late Charles E. Ingersoll managed to run his house with three men for outside
work, a chauffeur, a cook, two maids, a butler, and a pageboy called, in the
English manner, the buttons. (Once, in the 1920's, after a slight
misadventure in the stock market, Mr. Ingersoll advised his family that some
stringent belt-tightening was in order, and in a drastic economy measure he
dismissed the buttons. But it so distressed him to see his family thus
deprived that be sent them all off to White Sulphur Springs for an extended
rest and holiday while he hired another buttons.) In the old days, the
Ingersoll staff at Penllyn was such that the meandering gravel drives of the
estate could be freshly raked after each vehicle passed. But on the Ingersoll
place the other day, Mr. Ingersoll's son John and his wife sat down for
cocktails feeling tuckered. The two (she is a Cadwalader) had spent the
afternoon replacing a hundred feet of iron fencing. Far from entering a
decline, Real Society is often working very hard.
And yet here again we are faced with a contradiction. For all the talk of the
servant problem, there are a number of Society families who seem not to have
been affected by it at all. On the North Shore of Long Island, throughout the
Great Servant Shortage of the Second World War, one hostess managed to muddle
through with fourteen maids who did nothing but arrange flowers. (How do
fourteen young women busy themselves with nothing but flowers? Among other
things, they implanted large Styro-Foam balls with broom straws and, at the
end of each straw, secured a rose; the huge floral globes were used as table
centerpieces. In the conservatory, an organ-pipe cactus grew nearly two
stories high. Each day, the girls decorated it by placing a camellia bloom on
each needle. Striking color effects were sometimes worked out with, say, red
blossoms on the base of the cactus, fading to pink, and to white at the top.
"That sort of thing," commented an awed guest when be saw one of the floral
fountains, "ought to be government-subsidized.")
At "Viking's Cove," her summer place at Oyster Bay, as well as at her houses
in New York and Palm Beach, Mrs. George F. Baker appears to have successfully
overcome the servant problem. A year or so ago her English butler of many
years' service expressed a desire to return to England for a visit. Mrs.
Baker agreed to let him go and, moreover, made him a gift of his passage on a
boat. But he had no sooner sailed out of New York Harbor than Mrs. Baker
remembered a party she was having for Senator Barry Goldwater two weeks
later. She cabled the butler on shipboard, and when he reached Southampton,
he took one brief look at his native land -his first in nearly twenty years �
and boarded a boat to take him home again. "I could never have given the
party without him," said Mrs. Baker.
Even in Spartan, unshowy old Boston, the servant problem seems to be more a
matter of how you look at it. Here, when a young debutante asked a friend if
she would enjoy helping her pick out a gown for a coming party, the friend
said that she would be delighted. The friend was startled, however, when the
debutante sat her down on a sofa and spread open a Sears, Roebuck catalogue
between them. When the friend murmured something about the uncertainty of
getting a proper fit, the young lady said, "Oh, I can always have Anna take
it in." Anna, needless to say, was her governess.
Anthropologists will journey to remote corners of the earth to find those
rare spots where a species, or form of life, is still in the process of
evolution. Any aboriginal society is a rewarding study, best observed before
the missionaries have arrived and instructed all the natives to wear Mother
Hubbards, and so it is with the American concept of a social elite. There are
only a few places left where the Real Society notion can still be glimpsed
evolving, where one can see how it started, and why. In such Eastern cities
as Philadelphia, Charleston, and Boston, the evolutionary process was
completed in the early 1900's when Society began to congeal into a more or
less consistent pattern, and to begin its continuous and stately celebration
of genealogy. San Francisco, on the other hand, a newer city, was just
beginning to emerge from the primordial ooze when it suffered its historic
fire and had to start all over again. Since then, it has had to work extra
hard and fast to establish for itself an Old Guard. If Society ever -was what
it used to be, San Francisco should be a good place to observe it.
"But how can there be a Real Society out there?" perplexed Bostonians are
likely to ask. "After all, nobody's been there for longer than three
generations � and who were they originally? Gold prospectors and prostitutes,
from what I'm told � the worst sort of ragtag and bobtail." But Thomas Carr
Howe, director of San Francisco's California Palace of the Legion of Honor,
has said, "The fascinating thing about Society here is that the leaders of
the city today are the grandchildren of the people who made the place." It
has been a long time since any Easterner could make such a statement. "I
gather they just copy what we do here," says a Philadelphia lady somewhat
sniffily. To this, few ,San Franciscans would seriously demur. But they would
certainly add that, in San Francisco, they have, in the copying process,
learned how to do it better. A cold war has raged for years between the
social capitals of the East and West Coasts, and nothing pleases an Easterner
more than an opportunity to put a San Franciscan in his place. In Boston not
long ago, a San Francisco woman was being entertained at a party on Beacon
Hill, and, before dinner, was offered a cocktail � that curious Bostonian
concoction, the Sweet Martini. When, in due time, no second drink was
offered, the San Francisco lady turned to her hostess and, holding out her
empty glass, said brightly, "In San Francisco, we have a saying 'You can't
fly on one wing!' " Her hostess smiled coolly and replied, "In Boston, we fly
on one wing."
Though the pick and shovel did indeed come first to San Francisco, and though
several mining fortunes were quickly made, most of them were quickly spent.
The most substantial money in the city today rep resents fortunes made in
places where the miners spent theirs. San Francisco's famous Big Four, for
instance Charles Crocker, Collis P. Huntington, Leland Stanford, and Mark
Hopkins-were Sacramento merchants who collected the little sacks of gold that
the miners brought down from the hills, and parlayed them into fortunes large
enough to build the Central Pacific and Southern Pacific Railroads. Then
there was another quartet of families � the Floods, the Fairs, the Mackays,
and the O'Briens � the great Irish "Silver Kings" of the Comstock Lode, who
quickly put their Comstock fortunes to work in other areas. (From the Fairs,
San Francisco acquired its Fairmont Hotel; Clarence H. Mackay made millions
in telephones, telegraphs, and cables.)
These eight names are still liberally sprinkled throughout the pages of the
San Francisco telephone book. They might be called the core of the San
Francisco Social Register. To them have been added names from more recent �
but only slightly more recent � banking, mercantile, and shipping fortunes,
names such as Sutro, Blyth, and Monteagle (finance), Spreckels (sugar),
Folger (coffee), Ghirardelli (chocolate), and Lapham (shipping). Other now
impeccable San Francisco families include the Newhalls (married to
Spreckelses and O'Briens), the Metcalfs (married to Huntingtons), the
Hendersons (married to Crockers), the Redingtons (John Redington is married
to Diana Crocker; William W. Crocker lives on Redington Road), the Nickels
(married to Morses, of the Code family), the Meins (married to Nickels), the
Olivers (married to Fays), the Tobins (married to Fays and de Youngs), the
Thieriots (married to Tobins and de Youngs), the Millers (married to
Folgers), and the Fays (married to Millers, Meins, Tobins, and practically
everybody else).
Also important to San Francisco Society are a number of wealthy Jewish
families � the Haases, the de Youngs, the Hellmans, the Zellerbachs, the
Dinkelspiels, the Schwabacbers, and the Fleishbackers, to mention a few �
and, because members of these families have intermarried with non-Jewish
Society families, a number have found their way into the Social Register,
despite that publication's customary "policy." "We are fortunate," says a San
Francisco woman, "in having a perfectly lovely group of Jewish people here."
This sentiment is echoed almost as often as those extolling San Francisco's
hilltop views of the Bay. With it, of course, goes the implication that the
Jewish families should feel fortunate, too, to be so favorably regarded.
Local retailing money is represented socially by the Prentis Cobb Hales (Hale
Brothers' department store), the Carl Livingstons (Livingstons' specialty
store), the Magnins (I. Magnin & Company, another specialty store), the
Hector Escobosas (he is president of 1. Magnin), the James Ludwigs (head of
the local Saks Fifth Avenue), and the Baldocchis. (Podesta Baldocchi is a
chic flower shop but, as one matron puts it, "All the Baldocchis aren't in
flowers, just as all the Aliotos aren't in fish." Alioto's is an eating
establishment on Fisherman's Wharf.)
One factor that has helped the rapid growth of a Social Establishment in San
Francisco has certainly been the burgeoning growth of the city itself. San
Franciscans bewail the presence of so many (I new people," but the new people
have certainly done their share to make things pleasanter for those who have
been there somewhat longer. Since many of the makers of early fortunes bought
land, the present generation is not only rich by inheritance but growing
richer. For example, when Mrs. George T. Cameron's father, the late Meichel
H. de Young, told her he was making her a gift of "some sand dunes," Mrs.
Cameron thought little of it. It did not occur to her that, after a few
years, those dunes would form a considerable piece of metropolitan real
estate, now being divided into building lots selling for thousands of dollars
apiece.
In San Francisco it is possible to see that being a member of an emerging
elite can be a complicated experience giddy, and yet baffling; full of
unexpected pleasures, and yet at the same time full of unforeseen headaches.
With plentiful money, which everyone in San Francisco Society has begun to
take for granted, and with the idea of "Society" still a fresh, bright,
important-seeming notion, it is certainly fun to pamper oneself. A kind of
careless self-indulgence that was characteristic of Eastern Society a
generation ago, in the 1920's, now pervades the San Francisco air. A
generation from now, frivolity may have gone out of fashion, but at the
moment it is still fun in San Francisco to dash off to Scandinavia in search
of a pair of "really good house servants," as one couple recently did. It is
still fun to buy up whole rooms from French chateaux, have them dismembered,
shipped home, and reassembled in suburban Burlingame, a practice which palled
in other sections of the country three decades ago, at least. No one in San
Francisco is bored with his gold-plated bathroom fixtures. Many houses are
still putting them in, and the old line, first attributed to Mrs. Stotesbury,
about gold being easy to care for "because it doesn't need polishing" is
being trotted out all over the town. Dorothy Spreckels Munn's chinchilla
bedspread is not considered in the least outre. It is fun.
It is fun to dress up in white tie and tails or a long gown twice a week, and
sit in a golden box at the Opera � though Opera�going in Eastern cities has
become a pastime for older folks. In San Francisco it is fun to dress up for
all occasions � and here, of course, is where the city's climate has been
such a boon to fashion-minded women. It is "dress-up weather" for suits,
hats, furs, gloves, and jewelry all year round. San Francisco is known as one
of the world's dressiest cities, and San Franciscans would not have it
otherwise. While Boston women "have a hat," and are said never to need to buy
one, San Francisco ladies buy hats by the dozens of dozens; they may even
wear bits of veiling and fluff in their hair for luncheon in their own
houses, and carry silk reticules from room to room. In San Francisco it is
fun to have small, informal luncheons cooked to perfection by an imported
Swiss chef, with two wines and gold utensils, served in Directoire plates at
a table decked with scores of saucer-sized camellias fresh from the garden.
Lest such pleasurable splendors seem vulgar, great care is taken to make them
seem effortless, even ordinary, and yet authoritative and correct. San
Franciscans make it a point to know good food from bad, veritable French
furniture from reproductions, diamonds from thinestones, mink from muskrat.
San Francisco Society works with astonishing intensity at making itself the
genuine article, not an imitation.
Great stress is placed on manners. "Never point," one San Francisco
mother teaches her children, "except at French pastry." Do's and don'ts are
rampantly important. "We'd never wear diamonds before lunch," says one woman.
"Anyone who'd wear a mink stole in the daytime is automatically out," says
another. "I think it's almost insulting not to serve wine with meals," says
Mrs. Michael Tobin. "Even to people I didn't really want to meet, I'd serve
wine � and not a California wine, either. As for food, we simply won't serve
the ordinary. Steak is for butchers."
San Francisco people believe in entertaining in their homes, and this is one
of the most house-proud cities in America. It matters little whether one's
house is large or small, built last year or "before the fire"; what matters
is how it is "done," and how it is run. San Francisco is an interior
decorator's paradise. "We wouldn't dream of asking anyone to dinner in a
public restaurant," says one young hostess. "I can't remember when I was last
inside one." Sixteen for dinner is her favorite number; usually it is black
tie. There is a strong Southern flavor, carefully cultivated, in San
Francisco; many Gold Rush families came from the South, and at the time of
the Civil War, it was touch and go whether California would side with the
Union or the Confederacy. When you are entertained in some of the houses of
San Francisco Society, it is often possible to imagine yourself on a
plantation in antebellum Virginia.
Public interest in the doings of Society has gone somewhat stale in the East.
Not so in San Francisco. While apathy and indifference have reduced Society
pages to a few columns in New York, San Francisco Society receives page after
page of fulsome glowing attention in the daily press, and twice as much on
Sundays. And this news, furthermore, is read by everyone in the state of
California. The opening of the San Francisco Opera is more than a major
social function; it is a public pageant and fashion show, with worshipful
teenagers lining the streets beforehand. At the annual Opera Fol de Rol, an
Opera Guild benefit at which the stars give free performances, the main floor
of the Civic auditorium is filled by the few hundred Society sponsors who buy
tables, but the vaulting gallery above is packed with some six thousand
non-Society faces which gasp and crane forward as each new Society figure
makes an entrance. After one of these affairs, a housewife from the gallery
said, "Of course I love to hear the artists sing, but the real reason I come
is to see the Society women in their beautiful dresses." Opera patronage has
become the most profitable avenue for the San Francisco social climber, as it
was in New York in the days of Otto Kahn.
Riding up Washington Street in a taxi recently, a visitor was surprised to
have the driver point, with more than a touch of civic pride, to the A. B.
Spreckels mansion. He then proceeded to describe some of the features of the
house � the $30,000 French commodes, the wallto-wall carpeting in the
servants' rooms, the $25,000 motor-operated movable glass swimming-pool
enclosure with its $2000 built-in radiantheating mechanism, its owner's
venerable custom-built wicker-sided Rolls-Royce with its mink lap robe and,
of course, Dorothy Spreckels Munn's celebrated chinchilla bedspread. The taxi
driver had seen none of these things (except the Rolls), but he loyally
approved of all of them. (Though San Franciscans never tire of deploring the
"showiness" of Los Angeles, San Franciscans nonetheless allow their houses to
be photographed for use on tourist postcards.)
But for all the fun of cultivating the grand manner, there are drawbacks. A
developing Society can develop growing pains, and in San Francisco, one of
these has been a fierce social competitiveness which, more than anything
else, is reminiscent of the New York of Edith Wharton in The Age of
Innocence. San Francisco has an obsessive concern with class. Newcomers, who
may not realize it, are carefully sized up and then ticked off according to a
local shorthand system. To the question, "What's so-and-so like?" the answer
may be, "N.O.C.D.," which means, "Not our class, dearie." Acceptable souls
are classified O.C.D., while those with no class are labeled N.C. A fourth
category is P.C., which stands, according to one young San Franciscan, for
"Pittsney-Classney," and that, according to another, is San Francisco baby
talk that means "fifth class � the kind of people who sit in the dress circle
at the Opera, and who serve potato-chip dips made out of dried onion soup mix
and sour cream."
San Francisco Society is divided into sets and cliques and circles and the
circles intersect, and meet, and blur like rings on a college beerhall table
� with an effect just about as chaotic and untidy. Everyone has his group,
but each group exists at the expense of another group, and the rivalry is
stern and sometimes ferocious. There is, of course, an older group and a
younger group, and a quiet group and a "jetty" group, but it doesn't stop
there. "We have," as one of the younger non-jetty group explains, "our A
Group � the people we adore and can't see too much of. Then we have the B
Group, containing people we adore less. Then we have the Bidet Group, our
little nickname for the people connected with the European embassies and
consulates in the city, and the Wetback Group � people with the Latin
American consulates. Of course we put some of the Wetback Group and the Bidet
Group into the A Group, and some into the B Group, and often we invite the A
Group and the B Group together, but there's sort of a subsection of the B
Group which we call the C Group, who are the people we see only about once a
year, at Christmastime."
Then there is the Political Group � "People who get terribly interested in
politics and who are always inviting the mayor for dinner," and there is a
Mumsy Group -"Their daughters come out in the afternoon, at little teas," and
a Dress-Up Group which buys its clothes in Rome and Paris and whose daughters
come out at spectacular balls. Each of these groups is convinced the other is
doing it wrong. There is an organization known as the Spinsters, a
postdebutante club rather than a group but, according to a member, the
Spinsters splinter into groups of their own. The Spinsters' male counterparts
are called the Bachelors. The Spinsters give a flossy ball each year, and
shortly after it, the Bachelors give a flossy ball "to repay the Spinsters
and certain debutantes to whom the Bachelors are indebted." The Bachelors
stress that only certain debutantes are invited. "Others will knock vainly
for admission to our ball," says one Bachelor. There is also an informal
men's group called the Downtown Operators' Association which strives for
social acceptance but which, according to Gorham Knowles, a former president
of the Bachelors, is made up of men who couldn't get into the Bachelors. The
Downtown Operators, needless to say, don't give a ball of any kind.
San Francisco Society is terribly worried these days that it may be getting
too big, and that too many people who don't deserve to may be managing to get
themselves in. "To be accepted here, a new person simply must be attractive,"
says one woman. She suggests that newcomers seeking acceptance by Society
arrive with at least two letters of introduction and recommendation. Then,
she explains, "We'll give them the go-around with invitations once. If they
seem attractive, we'll give them the go-around a second time. After that,
we'll either drop them or take them in. If we drop them, I'm very afraid
they're dropped for good." San Francisco insists that the social fatalities
are numerous and that, as a result, the number of people who are in Real
Society remains small. San Francisco is not at all embarrassed to admit that
it is snobbish. "Frankly, I'm a snob," Mrs. Michael Tobin has said. "So many
unattractive people have come to California that I'm determined to see to it
that my children mingle only with their own kind."
San Francisco Society is now in a kind of social-arbiter stage, as the East
was a couple of generations back. It is in a Ward McAllister phase, and a
short while ago it lost an excellent local equivalent of that famous
screener. He was, of all things, a headwaiter. Just as Mr. McAllister used to
maneuver guests into, and keep others out of, Mrs. Astor's gold-and-white
ballroom, so Ernest, headwaiter in the St. Francis Hotel's Mural Room,
conferred social status upon some and stripped it from others. One of the
city's most venerable traditions is "Monday lunch" at the St. Francis. This
lunch, attended by all of San Francisco's would-be and actual socialites, as
well as by columnists from the press who make avid note of who is there,
includes a fashion show which is somewhat desultory since the real show is at
the tables where San Francisco ladies are eating. (The forty-year-old
tradition supposedly began when certain ladies decided to make it publicly
clear that they were not bound to the ordinary chores of washday.) For over a
generation Ernest smoothly seated the best San Francisco women at the best
tables � on either side of the center aisle, the closer to the door the
better. Slightly less important women were accommodated on the encircling
balcony. Climbers of the garden variety were placed in the outer reaches of
the room, called Siberia. As a woman either advanced socially or slid down
the social scale, Ernest, with corklike dryness, saw to it that her table
location changed accordingly. Like all arbiters of elegance, Ernest was
incorruptible, unmoved by the most lavish bribery. One learned to dread his
look of icy disapproval as he accepted the too large tip. Alas, Ernest is no
more. His replacement in the Mural Room is doing his best, but according to
one woman, "He has made a number of serious mistakes."
San Francisco is competitive about addresses, and which suburban area is
"better" � Marin County to the north, or the Peninsula to the south � is a
point of stormy controversy and hard feeling. "Burlingame is San Francisco's
Long Island," says an old-time resident of Ross (in Marin County), implying
that Burlingame is all rather nouveau riche and dreadful. "Really, I don't
see why anyone would want to live there � you might as well be living in
Akron." Burlingame counters such snide comments by referring to Marin County
as "pure-push Marin" because, according to one woman, "Marin people are pushy
� purely pushy." "Of course," says a Burlingame woman, "people do still move
out to Marin, but I don't know what happens to them. They sort of disappear,
and we never see them again."
Burlingame, with its elegant country club housed in an old Crocker mansion,
undoubtedly outranks Marin in snob appeal and, probably, in per capita wealth
as well. But even in Burlingame things are not entirely stable. Brushing
Burlingame so closely that it is hard to tell where one leaves off and the
other begins is the somewhat amorphous township of Hillsborough. Of the two
places, everyone agrees that Hillsborough is better, but you must be careful
when you use the word Hillsborough as an address. "We always say we live in
Burlingame," says Mrs. Tobin, who actually lives in Hillsborough. "If you
hear people say they live in Hillsborough, you can be certain they are
parvenus or climbers."
Still another social island, south of Burlingame, is the more rural and
woodsy town of Woodside, and though Woodside and Burlingame people understand
each other and have not formed mutually exclusive groups, there is the
general feeling that Burlingame people are the more stylish, while Woodside
people are horsier, and go in for dog breeding, Black Angus, and polo.
A newcomer soon finds that not only is it wise to look askance at, and speak
with disfavor of, Los Angeles; it is also well to deplore Oakland and
Piedmont across the Bay. "Over there," says a San Francisco woman with a
Piedmontward wave of her hand, "they put on their jewels for breakfast and
wear long, sweeping gowns for tea." San Franciscans are willing to admit that
there may be a Society in Portland and Seattle � a greater likelihood of it
in Portland � and, 'just possibly, in Denver. But they give the nod to hardly
any other Western cities. The rolling coastal range of mountains, the rich
towns of the Central Valley, the Sierras, the Rockies � they might just as
well not exist. As far as Society is concerned, Society recommences at the
Pennsylvania Turnpike where, in terms of which Eastern prep school or college
one's son attends, the San Francisco competitiveness and rivalry starts all
over again.
New York, Philadelphia, and Boston do not spend much time arguing over
who, in each city, is that city's Social Leader. In San Francisco this is a
matter of fierce importance and, as the arguments rise to battle pitch, a
certain frontier flavor pervades the San Francisco air � an odor of saloons
and gunsmoke � and, with several able-bodied contenders for top position, the
fights are about as orderly as a Barbary Coast poker party, Beneath a veneer
of politeness and gentility lurk the scruples and politics of the mining
camp. Social claim-jumping goes on all the time and, whenever it occurs, the
socially dispossessed quickly muster their forces and charge out red-eyed for
revenge. "I think we must all agree," said one woman at a cocktail party
recently, "that Helen Cameron is unquestionably the social leader of San
Francisco." The woman to whom she was speaking, obviously of a different
camp, replied sweetly, "Oh, I agree that Helen is a darling. I simply adore
her. She's one of my dearest friends, but -" She let the sentence hang a
moment, heavy with unspoken meaning, and then added, "Well . . ." And then
she smiled and said, "After all (One of the "problems" with de Young was that
he was Jewish.)
There has never been an undisputed social leader in San Francisco. There are
only disputed ones. Other than Mrs. Cameron, there is her sister, Mrs. Nion
Tucker, but Mrs. Tucker may be slightly behind Mrs. Charles Blyth, whose
house in Burlingame, "Strawberry Hill," is one of the most beautiful estates
in California. Though placed in retirement for a while after the death of her
banker husband, Mrs. Blyth has since made, according to a friend, "a very
strong comeback," and now considers herself "the grandest woman in San
Francisco." But another lady who considers herself equally grand is Mrs.
Blyth's neighbor and arch rival, Mrs. Edmunds Lyman. When Mrs. Blyth gave a
party a while back for the visiting Queen of Holland, the Lymans were not
invited. (To make the snub as inconspicuous as possible, the Lymans hastily
scheduled a trip to Hawaii and were out of town on the day of the party.)
Mrs. Lyman was overheard to murmur, "Kay Blyth seems obsessed with the idea
of entertaining royalty these days. Is it true she's thinking of changing the
name of 'Strawberry Hill' to 'The Orangerie'?"
Then there are Mrs. Paige Monteagle and Mrs. Kenneth Monteagle,
sisters-in-law who appear together from time to time looking cordial but who,
it is generally assumed, actually loathe one another. Hard feeling is said to
stem from the time their mother-in-law died and one of the items left behind
was a huge grid of diamonds. The daughters-in-law flipped a coin for the
stones, and Mrs. Kenneth Monteagle won the toss, but her sister-in-law is
said to feel that those diamonds would look far better on her own bosom.
Socially, each woman has her own crops of staunch backers. "Lucile is an
absolute peach," says one group. "But Louise -" And, says another group,
"Louise is the most marvelous woman alive. On the other hand, Lucile -" And
so it goes.
"I detest the term 'social leader,' simply detest it!" says Mrs. Robert Watt
Miller. "It implies a certain amount of striving, don't you think?" Actually,
with rather little striving, she herself might be considered a social leader.
She is the dowager of the large and prosperous Miller clan, and her daughter
Marian is one of San Francisco's great beauties. But the Millers may have a
certain black mark against them, too. They came originally from Oakland.
For the most part, however, since San Franciscans cannot compete with the
East on the old-family level, they choose to turn that shortcoming into an
asset. Mrs. Miller, for example, was a Folger. "My father's family came from
Nantucket," she explains � where Folgers can still be found � "and they were
all pirates, but as far as I know none of them were jailbirds, quite." And as
for the great Flood family, young James Flood, a banker, rancher, and
yachtsman, makes no bones of the fact that his grandfather was a bartender
and his grandmother a chambermaid. "Why should he?" asks a friend. "The point
is that Floods today are ladies and gentlemen." Another San Franciscan says,
"Isn't it better to come up in the world than down?" And everyone enjoys
citing the case of the elegant and ancient Markoe family of Philadelphia.
(The Markoes, originally Marcous, were a French Huguenot family who settled
in St. Croix, Virgin Islands, in the seventeenth century, a few of whom
migrated north to America prior to the Revolution; when Mrs. Gordon
Fetterman, a family-proud descendant of the first American Markoes, journeyed
to St. Croix not long ago in a search for distant cousins, she found a few
but was unprepared for the fact that all the Virgin Island Markoes are now
Negroes.) Today, according to one San Franciscan, "The really chic thing is
to be able to find one honest-to-gosh prostitute in your family tree."
One of the younger set in San Francisco says, "It takes three generations of
education and breeding to rub the rough edges off firstgeneration money.
That's the state San Francisco is in today � all the roughness smoothed out."
And yet, oddly enough, one San Francisco woman who, though she might not
exactly qualify as a social leader, certainly belongs among the city's
grandes dames, has, on the surface, what might appear as rough edges. She is
Mrs. Adolph B. Spreckels � tall, stately and imposing, but a woman who slaps
her knee loudly and roars at a good joke. Mrs. Spreckels's Washington Street
house, high on a hill overlooking the Bay and most of the city, is a
fantastic whitestone sculpture with so many carved garlands and furbelows on
its facade that, in the San Francisco sunshine, it glitters like a confection
of spun sugar which, when you remember where the money comes from, perhaps it
is. Yet its mistress is forthright, direct, anything but delicate, and, when
she encounters artificiality (or "a phony" as she calls it), or rudeness, she
responds with a total squelch. (Once, when Elsa Maxwell asked her how old she
was, Mrs. Spreckels replied, "Old enough to remember when there was no such
person as Elsa Maxwell.")
Mrs. Spreckels has met, known, and been entertained by nearly every member of
the European royalty of her time. But when her daughter, Dorothy Munn, sent
her a photograph of herself sitting next to the Duke of Windsor, along with a
note that said coyly, "Look who I'm sitting with!" Mrs. Spreckels said,
"Well, I give up. Who is it?" She is a good friend of King Frederick and
Queen Ingrid of Denmark and points out, "I've got a signed photograph of them
hanging in my bathroom." Another friend was Queen Marie of Rumania. "The
Queen gave me a lot of gold furniture," she says. "I kept it out in the hall
for a while." Among the pieces was the Queen's gold throne; "very
comfortable," says Mrs. Spreckels. The precious collection now resides in the
Maryhill Museum in the state of Washington, one of several museums for which
Mrs. Spreckels is entirely or partly responsible. (Once, referring to the
royal furniture, Mrs. Spreckels said with a wink, "Actually, pet, I bought
it," meaning that the Queen parted with it in return for a contribution to a
favorite royal cause.)
With the millions left by Adolph Spreckels when he died, his widow began an
enormous and continuing program of personal and public philanthropy. Her most
impressive gift has been the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in
Lincoln Park, a replica of the Palais de la Legion d'Honneur in Paris. This
was erected not as a memorial to herself or her husband, but to the
California men who lost their lives in World War I. The building alone cost
three and a half millions when it was built, and Mrs. Spreckels added a vast
art collection. She also established the San Francisco Maritime Museum and
gave it a collection. More recently, she has assembled a collection devoted
to the dance and theatre which she hopes will one day become the nucleus of
still another museum. The cavernous garages of her house have for many years
been used as a Salvage Shop which she runs for the benefit of at least five
different causes. During World War II she entertained servicemen continually
and always presented each man's wife with an electric washing machine from
what was apparently an inexhaustible supply. Those around her insist that if
her unpublicized gifts were ever tallied they would far exceed her public
ones.
She is, however, far from one's vision of a Lady Bountiful. She likes to
entertain guests in her bedroom. Coming in from a busy day, she will toss a
large floppy hat over the swan's-neck post of her bed ("A king made love in
it, of course") and accept a drink from her butler while she removes her
stockings, talking full-steam to her visitors all the while. She may also
entertain in one of her bathrooms. There are twenty-five, all capacious, and
for years she kept a bridge table set up in each in case a foursome happened
to gather there. She makes a game of trying to shock people, and judges
people by their reactions to some of her more startling actions and
pronouncements. She has been known to arrive for a quick, unscheduled visit
to her Palace of the Legion of Honor with a mink blanket around her shoulders
and nothing else on but a nightgown and a pair of bedroom slippers. She is
fond of asking casual acquaintances over for a swim in her covered pool, and
then adding, "Of course I swim in the raw -hope you don't mind, pet." She is
descended from a titled French family named de Bretteville which emigrated to
Denmark many generations ago, and was fairly impoverished by the time her
branch of it joined the California Gold Rush and, as it turned out, found
very little gold. She is proud of the fact that, as a young woman � before
she met Mr. Spreckels � she used to walk two miles a day to save a five-cent
streetcar fare. She is also proud of her full name, Alma Emma Charlotte
Corday le Normand de Bretteville Spreckels, and claiming Marat's murderess in
her family tree, usually adds, "Got anybody you want murdered, pet? I'm your
girl!" At a luncheon which she gave for friends and patrons of her museums
last year, she grew bored with the speeches, all of which extolled her and
her good deeds and, finally, after a particularly fulsome paean, she turned
to the speaker and, in her whiskey-tenor voice inquired, "Want to hear
something dirty in Danish?" The speaker, nonplussed, nodded yes. Mrs.
Spreckels then uttered a few Danish words. "Very interesting, dear Mrs.
Spreckels, but what does it mean?" asked the speaker. "Fire up your behind!"
cried Mrs. Spreckels.
One of San Francisco's great blood feuds has been conducted between the
Spreckels family and the de Youngs. This is said to have resulted from old
"Mike" de Young's use of his San Francisco Chronicle as an occasional
instrument of blackmail. (There was the curious case of old Mr. Charles
Crocker who, back in the 1880's, built a superlative mansion on Nob Hill,
moved in, and, exactly one month later, moved out in a strange hurry,
whereupon the Crocker mansion suddenly became de Young's mansion. It is
widely assumed de Young "had something" on Crocker, and the house was the
price of keeping it out of the newspaper.) De Young, according to the
Spreckels family, also tried to frame Adolph Spreckels. In any case, one day
Mr. Spreckels strode down to the Chronicle's office, up to de Young's desk,
and fired point-blank at the publisher � who ducked, and the bullet missed
its mark. Today the feud is quiescent, and whenever Mrs. Spreckels has
"Monday lunch" at the St. Francis, she greets Mr. de Young's daughters, Mrs.
Cameron and Mrs. Tucker. The greeting is more polite than cordial. As she
once pointed out, "Those de Young women are nice, but we just can't be very
intimate since my husband shot their father."
Like many very rich people, although she has given away more millions than
she can remember, Mrs. Spreckels resents being asked outright for money. When
the staff of the Palace of the Legion of Honor organized a baseball team a
while back, it found itself fifty dollars short of the amount needed to buy
uniforms. The team, wondering whether the Palace of the Legion of Honor's
wealthy benefactress might help out, approached her. The team, its manager
told her, was to be called the A. B. Spreckels Memorial Baseball Team. Mrs.
Spreckels nodded approvingly. The A. B. Spreckels Memorial Team needed,
however, fifty dollars for uniforms, and perhaps � "What!" cried Mrs.
Spreckels. She flung open her reticule and poured its contents � lipstick,
emery boards, matches, a few coins, a handkerchief � on the table. "Where do
you expect me to get fifty dollars?" she cried. "You people have got my skin.
Now you want my guts!"
Mrs. Spreckels's less conventional antics dismay San Francisco Society; there
is a feeling that someone as rich as she should be somewhat more genteel. But
Mrs. Spreckels has discovered � and made the discovery long ago � that there
is more to being a grande dame than gentility or a broad A. To be a grande
dame one must have, among other things, the assurance to be one. Confidence
of mind and clarity of purpose matter more than the Grand Manner. Grandness
need have nothing to do with breeding, either, but merely with one's scale of
thinking. Grandes dames such as Alma Spreckels are far above caring what
other people think.
San Franciscans sometimes seem to harbor a mystical sense of mission � that
they have been given the duty of introducing Good Form and the Right Thing to
the wild and woolly West. San Francisco's social bellwethers are the great
Eastern social cities, and San Francisco seems continually to be asking
itself what the East might think. And yet, at the same time, one of the
grandest ladies of Eastern Society is the spiritual cousin of Mrs. Spreckels.
She is Mrs. Robert Homans of Boston, the former Abigail Adams, a descendant
of two United States Presidents, a niece of both Henry Adams and Brooks
Adams, and the present dowager of the ancient and distinguished Adams clan.
Mrs. Homans possesses Mrs. Spreckel's same social audacity and verve, and
ability to plunge forthrightly into situations that would surely daunt lesser
folk. Once, when Beacon Street had become impassable in a blizzard, Mrs.
Homans ordered her taxi to stop in front of her husband's club, the august
Somerset Club, and demanded a room for the night. When the club politely
explained that it had a rule against giving rooms to unescorted women, Mrs.
Homans said, "Very well. In that case, I'll go out and get my taxi driver."
She got her room. Now, a widow in her seventies, whose hair style has not
changed in forty years, she says, "When it comes to style, Boston doesn't
have much. We all have what we call a hat. You know, they cover your head. My
daughter makes me burn them now and then." Like Mrs. Spreckels, she is a
woman above style. Though she calls herself "the last of the old Adamses,"
she insists that Boston still has "a regular Society, a regime under which
you live and do the things you ought to do.'' Among the things she feels she
ought to do is spend at least ten hours a day turning over her fortune to
educational, cultural, and philanthropic institutions with incredibly little
fanfare. And of course the existence of such a regime does not prevent
Abigail Adams Homans from doing exactly what she likes. Her social position
is so secure that, as she says, "If I stood in the Common on my head,
people'd say, 'Oh, that's just Abigail Adams.' They wouldn't pay any
attention. We're conventionally independent."
Mrs. Homans's son, Robert Homans, Jr., is married to the Winthrop Aldrich's
daughter, Mary, thereby joining two of the most redoubtable families of New
York and Boston. The young Homanses live quiet, successful, and
conventionally independent lives in San Francisco.
pps. 16-43
--[cont]--
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==========
CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic
screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soapboxing! These are sordid matters
and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright
frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects
spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL
gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers;
be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and
nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
========================================================================
Archives Available at:
http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/CTRL.html
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
========================================================================
To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Om
