The Right People

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  “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 represents 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 Schwabachers, and the Fleishhackers, 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 I. 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 “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 châteaux, 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 outré. 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, véritable French furniture from reproductions, diamonds from rhinestones, 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 diam
onds 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 flowing 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 wall-to-wall carpeting in the servants’ rooms, the $25,000 motor-operated movable glass swimming-pool enclosure with its $2000 built-in radiant-heating 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 post-debutante 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.”