The Right People

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  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 first-generation 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. Y
et 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. Spreckels’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, “Ver
y 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.

  3

  “How Shall We Tell the Children?”

  Though each set of parents has its own specific formula, one of the most controversial issues in Society is the question of at what age, and how, to make the children aware of the special benefits and duties of their status. Some families, such as the Rockefellers, have traditionally made it a point to keep their children in the dark about the meaning of Rockefellerdom for as long as possible, and Rockefeller governesses were instructed to remove, from locked closets full of toys, only one toy per child daily, lest the young be overcome by the trappings of great wealth. In at least one Rockefeller nursery, a miniature kitchen was built adjoining where the children were taught to cook simple, unaffected dishes such as hamburgers, fried potatoes, and spaghetti. Once a week, furthermore, the children entertained their parents in the nursery for an evening meal the children had prepared. “I learned what it meant to be a Rockefeller long after I learned there was no Santa Claus,” says one of the family. What was his reaction? “It frightened me terribly. I had nightmares for weeks. I was certain that someone would try to kidnap me.” The Aldriches, who are related to Rockefellers by marriage, are similarly minded, and Lucy Aldrich Devens recalls that it was “many years before I realized that there was any money around.” She was so strictly and carefully reared that she actually thought the Aldriches were poor.