The LeBaron Secret

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Sincerely yours,

  Richard J. Walters

  Director

  Of course, she could have asked for the piece back, explained that it was a mistake. But she laughed the whole thing off, took it as a great joke.

  George Hessler, who pilots her 727, calls her “Nugget” because she periodically gives him nuggets of unrefined gold, knowing he collects them, from her own collection of souvenirs of the Gold Rush days. She gave him a particularly large one after that episode which she and Gabe Pollack spoke of on the very February morning we have been talking about. Well, you might argue, he deserved it, since what happened was Sari’s fault entirely. Still, if she hadn’t interceded, George could have lost his license.

  You will hear a lot of idle gossip and speculation about the LeBarons in this town, and you will hear much malicious fun made of the way the LeBarons seem to have worked so hard to erase, and renounce, their national origins and have tried to invent new ones for themselves. Well, this was mostly Papa Julius. You will also hear that, for all their airs, the LeBarons somehow always manage to “marry down.” It is true that, for all his airs, Papa Julius LeBaron married down. Mama LeBaron was the former Constance O’Brien, and Julius always tried to pretend that his wife was some sort of kin to the legendary William S. O’Brien, one of the “Irish Big Four Silver Kings” of the 1850s and 1860s. Not so. Constance’s O’Briens were the Irish chambermaid O’Briens, and her mother scrubbed toilets at the Palace Hotel—though that is an unkind thing to say, for Constance was a good and pious woman, and her parents were honest and hardworking people. It is also said that Peter LeBaron married down when he married Sari, and it is pointed out that Sari LeBaron’s own origins are shrouded in a certain amount of mystery. This is simply because there are some areas of her past that Sari LeBaron does not wish to discuss. And, given hindsight, in light of everything Sari has done, would you say that Peter married down? He married a woman of far greater intelligence and spirit and courage than he—for all his famous charm. Have you heard about the time, in the late summer of 1946 during the Teamsters’ strike, when Sari herself drove truckloads of freshly harvested grapes from the Sonoma vineyards to the crushing sheds—where the grapes must go as fast as possible after harvesting—and, warned of trouble from the Teamsters, drove with her husband’s loaded pistol beside her in the cab of the truck? On the road one morning, a striking Teamster saw her, recognized her, and tried to force her off the highway with his rig. She grabbed the pistol, aimed, and shot out two of his tires. For that, Peter married “down”?

  Much of the idle gossip and speculation you may have heard about the family is untrue, if not downright absurd. Someone just the other day said, “Where did Peter Powell LeBaron get his middle name from, anyway?” (Powell is an old and respected San Francisco name.) To which someone else at the party, fancying himself a wit, said, “I think it’s from the Powell Street cable car—I gather that’s where he was conceived, somewhere between Post and California.” Gossip. Actually, he was named in honor of Archbishop Terence Powell—as I’ve mentioned, Constance was very pious. And you will hear speculation about how Peter P. and Sari met, and there is a story that they met under scandalous circumstances in one of the notorious private rooms over the Old Poodle Dog. Nonsense. Sari was introduced to the LeBarons in a very ordinary way by Peter’s sister, Joanna, who was her best friend. You will also hear that Sari “had” to marry Peter because he had put her in a family way. This is also untrue. In fact, when the whole proposition of marriage was made to her, she was quite startled, even though she was—or let us say she thought she was—in love with him. At the time, yes. At the time, another man she thought she really loved had turned her down. Was her marriage, then, on the rebound from this other love? Not really. Remember that Peter was a very handsome man, a very glamorous figure.

  She loved him. She told me so. And he loved her. Or said he did.

  Much of the gossip is fueled by jealousy. One area of the city that admires Sari is the gay community, not that she gives a fig for them. No, that’s not quite true. She simply can’t quite understand the gay community, can’t quite comprehend what it’s all about, and prefers not to think about it all that much. But the reason why the gays admire her is because of her interest in renovating that still rather sleazy area south of Market Street—“south of the Slot,” as they say here—Howard Street, the Fillmore District. Her restoration of the Odeon Theatre was a part of that ongoing project. The Fillmore District is still pretty run-down, and there are plenty of winos there—“Sometimes I think I’m responsible for the winos,” Sari has said—but there are some architecturally fine old buildings there, Victorian-style houses and the like. Sari has bought some of these properties, and offered them at low-cost, low-interest loans to buyers who will agree to spend a certain amount to fix them up. These houses have appealed especially to homosexual couples. For some reason, they’re clever at that sort of thing. Quite a few shabby old houses have been turned into show-places, thanks to Sari. The winos and the homosexuals don’t seem to mind each other. The homosexuals call Sari “the Queen Bee.”

  You may have heard that Sari and Peter’s eldest child, Melissa, is peculiar. It is true that she is unmarried, and shares the White Wedding-Cake House at 2040 Washington Street with her mother. Years ago, Sari turned the whole first floor of the house into a spacious apartment for Melissa, with her own entrance, so she can come and go as she pleases, which she does, though Thomas tends to keep tabs on these comings and these goings. Thomas! If Thomas should depart this earth before his mistress does, Lord knows what Sari would do. But there is absolutely nothing wrong with Melissa’s mind, no matter what they say. Melissa has been given all the tests—the Stanford-Binet, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, et cetera—and her mother has been given the results. Sari could show them to you if you like. They show Melissa to be perfectly normal in every way. In most ways, at least. You may have heard that Melissa is a nymphomaniac, and an alcoholic. Melissa’s problem, if it is a problem, is more that she seems to get involved with a somewhat seamy, somewhat sordid element. This rock group, for instance. She seems to be attracted to what her mother calls “lowlifes.” Naturally, this worries and upsets her mother. It would worry any mother. The doctors used to say she would outgrow this. She hasn’t.

  Melissa’s problem, if it is a problem, is—to Sari’s way of thinking, at least—that she is basically a shy and insecure and introspective sort of person. This is why she excites so easily and why, when she is upset or disappointed, her reactions become … unpredictable. This is also why, at times, she drinks too much. The doctors have also suggested a chemical imbalance, but part of it all—and Sari herself will admit this—may be Sari’s own fault because of an error that was made … an error, a misplacement of trust … long ago, before Melissa was born, before Switzerland and all that … but that is getting way ahead of the story.

  Of course, many people think that the trouble is that Sari fussed over Melissa too much, always did, still does. Being fussed over became a habit with Melissa, a bad habit she couldn’t break. As a child, she liked it, you see. Now she demands it. And of course Peter—poor Peter—was no help, no help at all.

  Then there are the twin sons, Eric and Peter, Jr., identical twins. They are both handsome devils—take after their father—with fuller, darker, curlier heads of hair than any two young men nearing forty have any right to have. To this day, when they are in a room together, most people cannot tell them apart. Sari always could, of course; a mother always can. But it was easier for her because Eric—born three and a half minutes after Peter—was nicked in the left temple by the doctor’s forceps, and bore a small scar from this from the very beginning. Though the scar is very faint now, it has never gone away, and you can see it if you know where to look.

  Though identical in appearance, the two boys are quite unlike in temperament. For years, Eric was Sari’s little workhorse, clever and industrious, good with figures, and in 1980 S
ari rewarded him for all his hard work by naming him vice-president and director of marketing for Baronet. All well and good. But lately—is it the mid-life crisis we hear about?—Eric has been kicking up his heels a bit, straining in the harness, feeling his oats, as they say. This displeases Sari, who, after all, is still his boss. If there is any problem with Eric, it might seem, it is that Sari has tried too hard to carve Eric in her own image. Perhaps it is a mistake for any parent to try to carve a child—for any human to try to carve another human—in his or her own image. Perhaps. Long ago, Sari would have liked to have carved Melissa in her own image. That didn’t work, either.

  Meanwhile, Peter, Jr., soars through life like a bubble rising from the stem of a glass of champagne. He takes nothing seriously, unless it is having a good time. Peter loves fast cars, beautiful women, staying up all night in nightclubs—in an earlier generation, he would have been called a playboy. He works for Baronet, too, where his title is superintendent of the Sonoma vineyard, but he doesn’t work very hard, and once arrived for work—his Jaguar weaving uncertainly down the road—still in black tie, fresh from an all-night party on Russian Hill. When Sari heard about this caper, there was hell to pay, believe me. Peter’s nickname is “Peeper” or “Peep.” This is because, when he was a baby, his Aunt Joanna used to say that he made sounds “just like a little peeping frog” when he cried. The nickname stuck, and today Peter’s friends all call him “Peeper” or “Peep.” This is, you can see, a family fond of nicknames.

  Peeper has never married, and shows no indication that he ever will. His relations with women don’t last very long, and once he has bedded them down a few times he seems to lose interest. But since 1968, Eric has been married to Alix, and you cannot say that Eric LeBaron “married down.” Alix is the daughter of Harry Tillinghast, the president of Kern-McKittrick Oil, and was considered quite a belle when she married Eric. “The debutante catch of the year,” said the Chronicle when Alix came out at the 1965 Cotillion. “Oil and wine don’t mix,” said Sari, when Eric told his mother of his intentions, but the marriage has worked out happily enough. Happily enough. They have two teenage daughters, Kimberly and Sloane, also twins. Two sets of twins in two LeBaron generations. But in the case of the girls, they are fraternal twins—the two-egg kind, rather than the one-egg. Both girls attend the Sarah Dix Hamlin School, which their mother attended. Alix is a bit of a snob. She has enrolled the girls as boarders, for example, though they could easily commute from the Peninsula, because she feels that the boarding students—who of course pay a higher tuition—are higher in the school’s pecking order, socially, than the day students. Of course, she is right. The two groups hardly know each other’s names. Alix pronounces her name “A-leeks,” though her given name was Alice, which she found too common-sounding.

  Despite their different sorts of lives, Eric and Peeper are close, very close.

  And so there you have the LeBarons. There was one other child, who died. But we must not forget Joanna. Joanna is very important. Joanna is Peter Powell LeBaron’s sister, the same age as Sari, and if you live in New York you have no doubt heard of her. She has had a spectacular career in advertising, and now heads her own Madison Avenue agency, LeBaron & Murdock. She lives in great style in Manhattan—a duplex at 1040 Fifth Avenue, overlooking the park, the same building where Jackie Onassis lives. She spends most of her time there, although, as we mentioned, she also has a house in Santa Barbara. Joanna has no connection with Baronet Vineyards, Inc., except indirectly. It should come as no surprise that her agency has the Baronet advertising account—$20,000,000 worth of business, for which she takes a commission at a “family rate” that is supposed to be a secret. It isn’t, really. It is ten percent instead of the usual fifteen. Joanna married once, briefly, long ago, and then resumed the name LeBaron. From this union there was one son, Lance, who also eschews his father’s name and styles himself Lance LeBaron. He is a perfectly nice fellow. He works far from the wine business, as a stockbroker with Merrill Lynch, though his Uncle Peter left him some Baronet stock. He is two years younger than Melissa. Married. No children.

  And so you see that in the fifth generation there are only Eric’s two daughters. That is why Eric’s actions and behavior are important to his mother, why nothing must go wrong at this point. Of the two girls, Kimmie is her grandmother’s favorite. Why? Probably just because Kimmie is the prettier, livelier, more popular of the two.

  Sari would like to carve Kimmie in her own image.

  As for everything else, pay no heed to the stories you will hear, hereabouts, about the family. They have been called “rich as Croesus.” Well, how rich was Croesus, anyway? Did anyone ever count his wealth? Hundreds of years before the birth of Christ, did the ancient, ignorant, downtrodden Lydians even know their king that well? Baloney, says Sari LeBaron. Baloney and bull-do. They also like to talk here of the LeBaron “family curse.” Do we still believe in curses and witchcraft and spells? More baloney and more bull-do. Pay no heed, either, to various versions you will hear of the circumstances surrounding Sari’s crippling accident, or of the circumstances of Peter LeBaron’s death, et cetera, or that there is “something funny” about Melissa, based on Switzerland, and all that gossip that still goes on.

  There is only one truth about the way things happened, and only Sari LeBaron knows it all.

  She, and perhaps two other people.

  One of them is me.

  Two

  Today is the day for the boys from Madison Avenue to come out to San Francisco, as they do twice a year, to present their advertising campaigns, the television commercials and so on, for Baronet wines. Sari has heard along the grapevine that the Madison Avenue boys live in terror of these semiannual trips, that they spend weeks beforehand not only pulling together their layouts and storyboards, but also planning what they all will wear, in order to make the best impression on the old lady. She has heard that the entire trip between La Guardia and San Francisco International is spent not only in going over notes and market-research reports, but also on straightening trouser creases, hitching up socks, and checking neckties for spots. She can imagine them, getting on the airplane, carefully turning their jackets inside out and folding them, flatly and neatly, in the overhead storage bins so that they will arrive unwrinkled.

  The boys always manage to dress much the same—in dark gray or dark blue three-button suits that bear the unmistakable stamp of Brooks Brothers, with white or pale blue button-down shirts, ties with tiny paisley patterns on them, and slip-on shoes with gold-colored bits clamped across their tops. It is the way they suppose San Francisco businessmen dress (which it really isn’t quite), and Sari is certain that they don’t dress that way back home in New York. San Francisco, they have been told, is a quiet, elegant city (which it really isn’t), where the women wear mink jackets and hats and short white gloves, even in summer (which they haven’t done for years), and where anything that would smack of Hollywood must be painstakingly eschewed. But this is all right. And it is all right, too, that they dread these San Francisco meetings. After all, there is that $20,000,000 in annual billings to take into consideration, a sum that, in Sari’s opinion, is not to be sneezed at. And even though LeBaron & Murdock might be considered something of a family agency, there would be nothing to prevent Assaria LeBaron from—if she took a notion to—firing the lot of them and taking her business to Benton & Bowles. Benton & Bowles would be only too happy to take on Baronet. Only too happy.

  There are three Madison Avenue boys—Sari knows them well—and they have names. One is Mike Geraghty, thirty-fivish, a redheaded and freckled Irishman with a pleasantly open face. He is the account executive and, as such, he is the highest in their pecking order. It is Mike who assumes the privilege of standing closest to Sari’s desk—not over her shoulder, mind you, for that would be too presumptuous, too intimate; no one in the organization would have the temerity to do that. Mike stands, instead, just a little to the front, and a little to the side, of where Sari s
its, with the newspaper-advertising proofs spread out in front of him for Sari’s inspection.

  The other two young men are from the agency’s Creative Department. One is Bob Petrocelli, the art director who designs the ads. The other is Howard Friedman, the copywriter who writes the words. These two sit, a little apart from each other, in straight chairs in front of Sari’s desk. An Irishman, an Italian, and a Jew, the three are a carefully calculated ethnic mix. Also at the meeting, seated on the big leather sofa at a short remove from the others, is Sari’s son Eric.

  The five are gathered in Sari’s office now, and the meeting has begun.

  The corporate headquarters of Baronet Vineyards are located in one of the older buildings on Montgomery Street, and the office that Sari LeBaron now occupies was originally designed to reflect Papa Julius LeBaron’s notion of what a winery executive’s office should be—grand and appropriately baronial, with decorative touches borrowed from both California and medieval Europe. The walls and high ceilings are paneled in lustrous dark walnut, embossed with heraldic shields and escutcheons, and the polished marble floor is laid out in an egg-and-dart design of white and gold. Sari’s desk is framed by immense windows of stained glass that depict, in their various panels, sword-bearing conquistadores in tight-fitting cuisses and kneepieces, golden breastplates and épaulières, and ostrich-plumed helmets, as well as tonsured monks in cassocks and surplices bearing jugs and pitchers of wine. The chairs and sofa are all large and vaguely Spanish in design, covered in a rich black leather that gives the room its own smoky, waxy, male smell; and tall brass column lamps support heavy, fluted parchment shades that are painted with more heraldry—shields and crests and other armorial trappings.

  The room is also boldly self-congratulatory. Set into a wall above the sofa, in an illuminated glass case, are displayed examples of Baronet products over the years in their various forms, shapes, and sizes—half-pints, pints, fifths, quarts, liters, half-gallons, and gallons—and varieties: the whites, the reds, the roses, the golden Angelicas, and so on. On the opposite wall, in an identical case, there is a collection of wineglasses of various origins and vintages. And the wall that faces Sari’s desk is what Papa liked to call his Trophy Wall. Here, in frames, are all the awards, medals, tributes, and citations—both civic and industrial—along with the signed photographs from United States Presidents, every one from Calvin Coolidge through Ronald Reagan (with Franklin Roosevelt excepted), that the LeBarons and their company have amassed over the years. These are grouped around a gold-framed portrait of black-mustachioed Grandpa Mario Barone, painted from an early photograph. But even here the hand of the crafty revisionist of history has been at work. The plaque below the portrait of the man responsible for all this gives him a name he would never have answered to: “Marc LeBaron,” and, below this, the words “Founder: 1830–1905.”