Real Lace

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  And he was to have two more gala receptions to his credit. On his return from Washington to Los Angeles after his second acquittal, over five hundred people were at the platform to meet him—naval officers, clergymen, dignitaries, and motion picture stars. And his funeral, at St. Vincent’s Cathedral, which Doheny money had built, drew a capacity crowd of twelve hundred friends and admirers, while another two thousand stood outside the doors of the church, paying tribute.

  After Ed Doheny’s death, the Doheny companies which owned Fall’s ranch served Fall with an eviction notice, an ungrateful gesture. Surely the two who had been such pals in life cannot any longer be pals in heaven, or wherever they are.

  Today the United States Navy has its oil lands back. They are regularly checked for drainage. It has been minimal.

  Ma D. survived her husband for a number of years, living quietly and avoiding publicity in the vast reaches of her estate, surrounded by guards and watchdogs. Finally, she was taken ill and brought to a hospital, where doctors advised that she had only a short time to live. A priest was summoned to administer Last Rites, and was told to make all possible haste. When he arrived at the hospital, he was told that death was perhaps only moments away. He ran down the corridor, struggled with the heavy, handle-less hospital door, managed to push it open, and then skidded across the highly polished floor of the room and fell forward, elbows first, across the patient’s bed, landing on her stomach. With that, Mrs. Doheny expired.

  It is quite easy to see what kind of a man Albert Fall was, but what kind of a man was Ed Doheny? Was he a fool or a knave? Was he a hard-nosed hypocrite or merely naïve? Had he become so used to bribing and paying off governments—as he had done with such success in Mexico—that he simply believed that this was one of the more practical ways of doing business? Or did he envision all governments as basically corrupt, and therefore corruptible? Or was it simple self-faith? Had he become so rich, and so accustomed to the lavish use of money, that he had begun to believe his own myth and that he could do no wrong, no matter what he did or how he did it? Had he developed the same blind and implicit trust in his own mystic or psychic powers that he had once placed in his prospector’s willow wand? Or was he at heart an honest man, who honestly believed that what was good for Doheny today was good for the country tomorrow, and the next day the world?

  One man, long associated with the Doheny family, was asked once what he thought was the secret of Ed Doheny’s character and his success. “The ability to smell a dollar bill a mile away” was the answer. “He was not a nice man.”

  Chapter 12

  THE SILVER KINGS

  San Francisco has always taken both a dim and a lofty view of Los Angeles, and San Francisco money is considered to have acquired more “refinement” than that of the larger city to the south. The famous Big Four—Charles Crocker, Mark Hopkins, Collis P. Huntington, and Leland Stanford—who founded considerable San Francisco fortunes were, however, of origins no more genteel than Edward Doheny’s. Nor were San Francisco’s second Big Four, or Irish Big Four—James C. Flood, William S. O’Brien, James Gordon Fair, and John William Mackay—the “Silver Kings” of the Comstock Lode in Virginia City, Nevada. From its discovery in 1859 to its final depletion twenty years later, the Comstock was the largest and most valuable single pocket of silver ever discovered in the world, and from its mines poured, all told, more than $500 million worth of shiny metal, which made multimillionaires not only of the four Irishmen themselves but also of several others, including Adolph Sutro, William Sharon, and William Ralston.

  Jim Flood, described by Dixon Wecter as a “poor gamin of the New York streets,” had gone west with the Gold Rush and settled in what was then a rough-and-tumble frontier town with rutted streets and ramshackle houses, and set about to make his fortune. In San Francisco, Flood met another young fortune-seeker named Will O’Brien, and the two went into partnership with a local bar and grill called the Auction Lunch Rooms. Flood’s job was to mix the drinks, which he did in generous proportions, and O’Brien worked behind the stove, where he soon achieved a certain neighborhood celebrity for his Irish fish chowder, thick with potatoes. Presently the Auction Lunch Rooms was a popular gathering spot for miners who periodically came down from the hills to disport themselves at the city’s lively fancy houses, and to partake of hearty food and drink. In addition to their cooking and bartending skills, the two men had sharp ears, and they listened to miners’ stories and, in return for a drink or a cup of broth, took a mining tip or two. The Comstock sounded like a particularly good one, and, taking John Mackay and Jim Fair in with them as investing partners, they set off for Virginia City to stake a claim. When the Comstock came in, bartending and chowder-making days were gone forever.

  Will O’Brien dropped out of the quartet early, but the others stayed in, and perhaps no other American catapulted himself from squalor to glittering splendor in so short a time as Jim Flood. Instant riches, to Flood, demanded instant luxury, and one of his first orders was the construction of a massive brownstone mansion on the very top of Nob Hill. Flood’s house was so sturdily built that it was one of the few buildings in the city to survive the Great Earthquake, and it stands today exactly as it was, as the prestigious home of San Francisco’s Pacific Union Club. Flood also built another palatial house in suburban Menlo Park, which became known locally as “Flood’s Wedding Cake,” and was described by the late Lucius Beebe as “a miracle of turrets, gables, and gingerbread.” So much carpeting was required to cover the floors of these two houses that John Sloane, the carpet manufacturer from New York, found it necessary to send special representatives to California to handle the order, and soon it seemed simpler just to open up a branch store on the West Coast. Sloane’s today is where much of San Francisco buys its rugs and furniture.

  Jim Flood’s daughter, Jennie, became the instant belle of San Francisco, a dark-haired beauty famous for her wit, charm, and devastatingly large and flashing eyes. In 1879, Jennie Flood was courted by no less than a United States President’s son, Ulysses S. Grant, Jr., and the prospect of a match so pleased her father that he promised to build the pair a huge chateau in Newport as a wedding present. But young Grant, it seemed, had an eye for other ladies and, returning from a trip east, he delayed so long before reaching Jennie’s house—”dallying along the way with Dora Miller and other adorables”—that Jennie angrily broke the engagement. Later she was admired and squired about by the British Lord Beaumont, but this, too, came to nothing and, in the end, Jennie Flood never married at all, though she remained a colorful and popular figure in San Francisco.

  A later James Flood also cut a wide social swathe in the Western city, and his own big house—later to be given to the Order of the Sacred Heart—was the scene of some of the town’s most lavish parties. The most famous of these was called “The Original Costume Ball,” and was tossed, with no expense spared, in the Depression year of 1938. As described by a contemporary reporter, Julia Altrocchi:

  The great pillared entrance hall had been transformed into a garden of azaleas and blossoming fruit trees. The costumes represented both old and current “characters.” Mrs. Flood wore an old-fashioned crinoline of magenta silk. Her son, Jimmie, acted the part of Pop-Eye the Sailor Man. Mrs. Harold McKinnon was “charming in the wedding gown of her grandmother.” … “One of the loveliest costumes of the evening was that of Mrs. Willard Somers who went as the ark. Her pale blue gown was painted with animals two by two and her ark hat had a dove of peace in front and Noah’s three brothers in the back.” Charles Theriot [who had married one of the daughters of newspaper publisher Meichel H. de Young], as a newsboy, “distributed a one-page edition of the Chronicle” describing “floods” in the city, and specifically Jimmie Flood and his yacht, Dorade, which had just won the San Pedro to Honolulu race in 1936. The prize for the most amusing couple was awarded to Mrs. George A. Pope, Jr., as “a Floradora girl in pale pink over a chemise and over that an old-fashioned black satin laced corset,” and to her pa
rtner Tallant Tubbs, as “a second baseman of the Seals.” First prize for women went to Mrs. Sheldon Cooper, who arduously represented the framed picture of the Dauphin, and first men’s prize to Dick Magee who “entered the ballroom as a muleteer—with a live mule.”

  The most popular of the Comstock’s Big Four, however, was John William Mackay, a tall, slender, handsome man with a gentle nature and a generous heart. After his first big strike in the Mother Lode, in which he made $200,000, he announced that this was enough money for any man, and that “the man who wanted more than that was a fool.” Later, of course, finding himself a two-fifths owner of the giant Comstock, he managed to change his mind. He had been born virtually penniless in Dublin in 1831, and emigrated to America at the onset of the famine at the age of nine. He first worked in New York as an apprentice shipbuilder, but when tales of Western gold began to circulate, he headed for California. There he worked as a pick-and-shovel man for four dollars a day, but he shrewdly insisted on receiving only part of his pay in cash, and the rest in stock of the mining company. Thus, when the Mother Lode came in, he found himself all at once a moderately rich man. In 1867, after the Comstock had made him a hugely rich man, he heard a sad tale of a poor widow in Virginia City named Louise Hungerford Bryant, the daughter of a New York barber, who had married, gone west with her husband, and been left with a small daughter and a younger sister and virtually without resources. Mackay organized a collection for her, and, going to her house to present the money to her, he promptly fell in love with her. When he asked her to marry him, he warned her to judge him for his qualities as a man, not on the basis of his money, because, as he reminded her, “Circumstances in the mining business change quickly.” But even if he lost everything he had, he promised, “I can always dig a living with my bare hands,” and he swore to protect her—”with my fists, if need be.”

  Mackay not only did not lose all his money but went on to make a great deal more. In 1874 he and his wife moved to San Francisco and, two years later, came east to New York. Though neither Mackay had any formal education to speak of, nor any “breeding” in the social sense, they were both endowed with gentle and soft-spoken Irish attractiveness. Being rich didn’t hurt them either, and they made friends easily. Nevertheless, they were snubbed by New York society, but, when they moved on to Europe, they were welcomed. With their good looks and manners, they charmed everyone, including the Prince of Wales, who called John Mackay “the most unassuming American I have ever met.” Through all of what Mackay called their “top-of-the-heap living,” he and his wife remained steadfastly in love. In 1883 he formed the Commercial Cable Company, and went to battle against Wall Street titan Jay Gould’s Western Union telegraph monopoly. The financial community was certain that Gould, known as an unscrupulous and dirty fighter, would destroy “the Irish upstart,” and was filled with awe for Mackay when Mackay won. He was twice nominated to the United States Senate and, both times, modestly refused. But he was still a fighter, and, in 1891, when he was sixty years old, he had a chance to make good his early promise to his wife. A series of articles about her had been appearing in newspapers in both the United States and England stating that she had been, at first, a washerwoman and, later, had sunk “even lower than that.” and that she had sent her tiny daughters into the streets of Virginia City begging with tin cups. Mackay set out to find the instigator of the stories, a man named Bonynge, and, one day, spotted him through a window of the Bank of Nevada, chatting with the bank’s president. Mackay let himself into the bank through the back door and headed straight for Mr. Bonynge, who was taken completely by surprise. “I struck out with my right,” Mackay reported later, “and hit him in the left eye. Then I hit him again.… I’m not so handy with my fists as I used to be twenty-five years ago on the Comstock, but I have a little fight in me yet, and will allow no man to malign me or mine.”

  Of the Irish Big Four, Mackay was also by far the most philanthropic, and the complete tally of his giving will probably never be known because, when he gave to a charity that interested him, he nearly always insisted on absolute anonymity. He gave and loaned millions of dollars to friends and business associates, and these were also unrecorded. Two of his biggest gifts, however, could not be hidden—the Mackay School of Mines in Reno and the building of the Church of St. Mary’s in the Mountains in Virginia City. Throughout his life, he refused to discuss his money, and, when he died in 1902, his business manager told reporters, “I don’t suppose he knew within twenty millions what he was worth.”

  One of John Mackay’s stepdaughters and a sister-in-law married titled Europeans, which displeased him. But real tragedy was to strike John and Louise Mackay with the death of their son, Willie, at the age of twenty-five. Willie, an accomplished horseman, was riding a race horse at his private track in France, and the horse, startled by a shot, shied at a turn and Willie was hurled headfirst over the fence and into a tree, shattering his skull. A second son, Clarence Mackay, made a brilliant society marriage to the elegant Katherine Alexander Duer and settled down on a huge Long Island estate called “Harbor Hill.” “Harbor Hill” in the 1920’s was the scene of one of the most publicized balls of the decade, which the Mackays gave for the visiting Prince of Wales. Despite the sumptuousness of the house, its decor, food, furnishings, and art collection, the only object in which the Prince—who would later become the Duke of Windsor—expressed interest was a small statue by Gutzon Borglum of John Mackay, whom an earlier Prince of Wales had found so “unassuming.”

  Clarence and Katherine Mackay had three children—John William, Katherine, and Ellin. Ellin Mackay began publishing articles and short stories in The New Yorker in 1925 and, in one of them, wrote, “Modern girls are conscious of their own identity, and they marry whom they choose, satisfied to satisfy themselves. They are not so keenly aware, as were their parents, of the vast difference between a brilliant match and a mésalliance.” Shortly after these words appeared in print, and to the consternation of her family, Ellin Mackay proved that she meant what she said when she married a young Russian-Jewish composer from the Lower East Side named Irving Berlin (born Israel Baline). Though this union horrified her father, Clarence Mackay, long since divorced, later took his daughter’s advice, and married a singer named Anna Case.

  The story of San Francisco’s Fair family is considerably less glamorous. If John Mackay was the most likable of the Irish Big Four, James Gordon Fair was easily the least, and Fair managed to win the nickname of “Slippery Jim” very early in his career. Born in Belfast in 1831, the same year as Mackay, Fair came first to Chicago at the age of twelve, and then moved westward at the age of eighteen. By the age of thirty he had a mill on the Washoe River in Nevada, where he became chiefly responsible—making many enemies in the process—for driving San Franciscans out of Nevada development, which he then managed to take over himself. With his Comstock millions, he got the Nevada State Legislature (which in those days elected U.S. Senators) to appoint him to the Senate, where his career was undistinguished. “He made no impression on the Senate,” Frederick Logan Paxton has said, “save to advertise it as a haunt of millionaires, and he rarely took part in its debates.… But the gaudiness and irregularity of his life and the social ambitions of his family, to which his wealth allowed full gratification, attracted much attention for two decades.”

  In 1861 Jim Fair had married an Irish girl named Theresa Rooney, by whom he had four children—Theresa (“Tessie”), Virginia (“Birdie”), Charles, and James. After an acrimonious divorce, Mrs. Fair retained custody of Tessie, Birdie, and Charles, and Mr. Fair got James. His young namesake hated and dreaded his father and, soon after the divorce, committed suicide. Charles Fair made a youthful marriage which so angered his father that he disinherited him, and shortly after, Charles and his young wife were killed in an automobile accident. Birdie Fair married William K. Vanderbilt, but this, too, was disastrous and ended in divorce. (“Vanderbilts often marry Catholics,” says one of the Vanderbilts, “and always di
vorce them.”) Tessie Fair married Hermann Oelrichs in a huge San Francisco society wedding—to which her father was scrupulously not invited—and went on to become a reigning dowager of Newport for many years until she underwent a mental breakdown. In his own last years Slippery Jim Fair lived alone in a San Francisco hotel, solitary, bitter, and completely without friends, estranged from his entire family. When he died in 1894, his personal and financial affairs were in such a hopeless tangle that his will offered fifty dollars apiece “to any widows or children” of his who might be able to prove themselves such.

  Though the Fairs are no longer prominent in San Francisco, the Floods and Mackays currently decorate the pages of the Social Register. Of the third-generation James Floods who live in the horsy suburb of Woodside, a friend says, “The Floods today are all ladies and gentlemen. Nobody cares at all that his grandfather was a bartender and his grandmother was a chambermaid.” Nobody cares, perhaps, but everybody in San Francisco remembers.

  Unlike his contemporaries in Nevada and California, Tom Walsh was not so quickly lucky as he poked about with his pick and hammer in search of gold in the hills of Colorado. Born in Clonmel, County Tipperary, in 1850, Tom Walsh came to America in 1869 and, for a while, worked as a carpenter in Worcester, Massachusetts. At the age of twenty, however, he, too, was struck with what he called “the mining fever,” and headed west, where one of his first mistakes was to turn down a half-interest in a mining venture called the Homestake. The Homestake turned out to be one of the world’s largest gold mines, yielding all told nearly $300 million worth of ore, and became the foundation of the fortune of George Hearst, the father of William Randolph Hearst. Still, young Walsh was persistent, moving about from town to town—towns with such unprepossessing names as Leadville and Deadwood. In Leadville, he met a girl named Carrie Bell Reed, and married her in 1879, and this couple went to live in Sowbelly Gulch, where their first home was an abandoned boxcar which had been lifted from its tracks and placed on a foundation of logs with an earthen ramp leading up to the front door. Tom Walsh cut holes in the boxcar for windows, for which his wife made curtains of checked gingham, and planted windowboxes. Even then Mrs. Walsh must have had visions of grandeur. She found the name of Sowbelly Gulch “eructative,” and for a while tried to get the town to change its name to “St. Keven’s.”