California Rich

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Like Adolph Spreckels, Mr. Hearst cared little about San Francisco society—nor did San Francisco society care much for him. After marrying a New York woman named Millicent Willson, he had more or less abandoned her for a mistress, whom he kept in Sausalito. Later came his long involvement with the actress Marion Davies. All of this scandalized San Francisco society, and society was even more irked by the fact that Hearst didn’t mind being ostracized. He flaunted his profligate lifestyle.

  Hearst’s feud with de Young was almost as longstanding as Spreckels’. His father, George Hearst, had come, like de Young’s, from Missouri in 1850, but George Hearst had been much more successful. At a time when everyone was speculating in gold stocks George Hearst bought a good one, in the Homestake Mine in South Dakota. Soon he was worth several hundred million dollars. He then invested in silver and copper, and was lucky again, with the Anaconda Mine in Montana. His holdings expanded to include mines in Mexico, ranches in California and South America, and, almost by accident, an ailing San Francisco newspaper called the Examiner. George Hearst sent his only son, William, to Harvard, which promptly expelled him. Casting about for something to do, William Randolph Hearst asked his father for the Examiner. Reluctantly—the senior Hearst had hoped for something more “respectable” than newspaper work for his son—the Examiner was turned over to William Randolph Hearst in 1887.

  Immediately W. R. Hearst set about outdoing the Chronicle in the luridness of its stories. On the first day of young Hearst’s stewardship the Examiner’s front-page headlines read:

  DEAD BABIES:

  BLOODY WORK:

  MORE GHASTLY LIGHT ON THE SLAUGHTER OF

  THE INNOCENTS:

  THE DARK MYSTERIES OF A GREAT CITY

  Like Michael de Young, Hearst was theater-struck. It was Hearst who had seen the news potential in Sarah Bernhardt’s San Francisco debut in Fedora and had orchestrated her much publicized arrival. A Hearst reporter had escorted her through Chinatown, taken her to a Chinese theater where she had made good copy by walking onstage and chatting with the actors, and accompanied her to an opium den, where, at the sight of dazed bodies lying about in the gloom, La Divine had exclaimed, “C’est magnifique!”—making more good copy. Hearst had infuriated de Young when it turned out that Bernhardt had agreed to give interviews exclusively to the Examiner. While the Chronicle imported grueling tales to San Francisco from wherever it could find them, Hearst reporters were instructed that when no startling news was available they were to create some of their own. A reporter might fling himself into the Bay and wait to see how long it took for someone to rescue him; or feign a suicide attempt from the roof of a high building in order to report the reactions from the street below: PRIEST WEEPS, CRIES TO SUICIDE: “DON’T JUMP!”

  Hearst’s ambitions far outdistanced those of Michael de Young. De Young’s fortune was based primarily on his one newspaper. Hearst’s money, which was inherited, would carry him on to the ownership of some twenty newspapers across the United States, a stable of magazines, his own motion picture production company, a feature syndicate, a wire service, a newsreel company, and, at one point, more California real estate than any individual since Henry Miller. It would also carry him to the point, as a compulsive spender, at which he had very nearly spent it all. Hearst had no particular interest in building a new museum in San Francisco. He was, after all, busily building a private museum of his own at San Simeon—his hundred-and-fourteen-room Moorish castle, on a mountain overlooking the Pacific, composed of rooms and filled with furniture collected from all over the world—and his own private zoo. But he was interested in anything that would annoy Mike de Young, and so he happily lent the Examiner’s editorial support to Mrs. Spreckels and her museum.

  It was, indeed, Mrs. Spreckels’ project, supported financially by her husband’s huge fortune. Of Mrs. Spreckels’ origins rather little is known, and throughout her lifetime that was the way she preferred things to be. She was born March 24, 1881, probably in San Francisco—though she was a little vague about that too—as Alma Emma de Bretteville. Later she would enjoy saying that her full name was Alma Emma Charlotte Corday le Normand de Bretteville, to which she would add for good measure “von Spreckelsen.” (She was somehow descended, or so she claimed, from Charlotte Corday, the mad French aristocrat who stabbed Marat in his bathtub, and in this connection, she would often open conversations with “Got anyone you want murdered?”) The De Brettevilles had been forced to leave France at the time of the Edict of Nantes and had fled to Denmark, whence Alma’s Danish-speaking parents had emigrated.

  Alma Spreckels never liked to speak of her childhood, and it is assumed to have been mean and poor. But as a young woman her Junoesque figure and handsome if not beautiful face caused her to be much in demand as an artist’s model. In the early 1900s she posed, in long flowing robes, for the tall “Winged Victory” sculpture that stands at the top of the Dewey Monument in the center of San Francisco’s Union Square. And in various bay-front saloons there were said to be other poses of the well proportioned Miss de Bretteville without the robes. Her youth was apparently peripatetic, adventuresome. At one point in the 1890s she brought a lawsuit against a gold miner in the Klondike for “personal deflowering,” and was able to collect ten thousand dollars in personal damages. For a while she worked as a nurse for a family in Woodside, California. For a while too she studied art and art history at San Francisco’s Mark Hopkins Institute, and at the time of the great earthquake and fire of 1906 she helped salvage that institution’s collection of paintings and sculpture from the flames. In the quake’s aftermath she also showed her public-spirited side. San Franciscans were forbidden to build fires or to cook in their homes, and Alma de Bretteville organized communal cook kitchens in Golden Gate Park.

  Just how this bohemian and free-spirited creature met Adolph B. Spreckels is unknown unless, as has been rumored, it was in one of the private rooms of the Old Poodle Dog, a San Francisco restaurant that also offered discreet accommodations to its patrons. But in 1908, in Philadelphia, Alma de Bretteville and Mr. Spreckels were married, not long after Adolph’s father had died and left him roughly half of the vast sugar fortune. She was twenty-seven and he was fifty-one. Adolph’s marriage fairly late in life would mean that his children would grow up as contemporaries of his brother John’s grandchildren.

  The newlyweds spent their honeymoon making a grand tour of Europe, and returned to Mr. Spreckels’ white sugar-cake mansion, with its indoor swimming pool and third-floor ceiling of Tiffany glass, in Pacific Heights. At the time, San Francisco’s unquestioned Queen of Diamonds was Mrs. Leland Stanford, who was said to own more jewels than any crowned head in the world, with the exceptions of Queen Victoria and the Czarina of Russia. Her collection included four matching sets of diamond pieces, part of a million-dollar cache of stones that had belonged to Isabella of Spain. Each set consisted of a necklace, spray, earrings, tiara, bracelets, and pins. One set “emitted violet rays by day,” another was composed of yellow diamonds, the third of pink diamonds, and the fourth of pure white gems. Mrs. Stanford also owned a large pear-shaped black diamond and a necklace of varicolored diamonds said to be the finest necklace in the United States. She also owned sixty pairs of diamond earrings. Incredible though it seems, it was reported that she once wore her entire collection to a private dinner given by William E. Dodge, choosing a black dress with voluminous folds on which all her little ornaments could be pinned and clipped. Adolph Spreckels was eager to have his new wife enter into a competition for the title held by Jane Stanford. But Alma Spreckels cared little for jewelry, though she did accept several fine strands of pearls, two magnificent diamond clips, and several diamond-and-emerald pieces. Alma Spreckels was much more interested in art.

  At the French pavilion of the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco, Mrs. Spreckels first became aware of and admired the works of Auguste Rodin. Soon she was off to France to visit Rodin in his studio, where the sculptor had recently completed “
The Thinker.” Alma Spreckels liked “The Thinker,” and rather than pester her husband for the money, she simply pawned some jewelry and bought one of the eighteen castings of the sculpture for fourteen thousand dollars. (When her husband discovered what she had done, he was so embarrassed that he quickly retrieved the jewels from the pawnbroker.) She presented the statue to the city, and it was placed in Golden Gate Park. This was the germ of her idea to give San Francisco a museum that would concentrate on French art and culture. It would be called the California Palace of the Legion of Honor and would be designed as a replica of the Palais de la Légion d’Honneur in Paris. Before it was finished it would be declared also a memorial—not to Alma and Adolph Spreckels but to the California dead who had been killed in World War I. Originally Mrs. Spreckels had planned to build her museum directly across the street from her house. But with the help of her friend Loïe Fuller, she selected an even more dramatic site, on a high bluff in Lincoln Park overlooking the Pacific and the Golden Gate.

  Though it was completely intuitive, Mrs. Spreckels’ choice of the Rodin sculpture as the focus of her museum was a shrewd one. A number of important private art collections had already been assembled in the East—in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. But for some reason, moneyed San Franciscans had been slow to turn to art collecting in any significant way. Perhaps it was because the West Coast had no great art dealers comparable to Nathan Wildenstein or Lord Duveen to encourage and guide the tastes of wealthy westerners. What San Francisco had instead was Solomon Gump and his sons, who started out supplying gilded cornices and mirrors for the mansions of the city’s new-rich millionaires. Gump’s store branched out into European and Oriental objets d’art, and he also sold paintings—primarily bosomy nudes—which decorated the walls of San Francisco’s best bars and fanciest brothels. The rest of the art sold by Gump’s consisted primarily of heavy and elaborate picture frames that housed large, dark, and undistinguished oil paintings; one had the impression that San Francisco paintings existed merely to show off their frames. In such a frame Gump’s had sold Collis P. Huntington a nude painting of the Empress Josephine. Otherwise, according to Leon Harris in Merchant Princes, Gump’s and San Francisco’s tastes ran to “socially acceptable subjects such as praying peasants, frolicking tots, noble animals, and inspiring landscapes.”

  But there may have been another reason why San Franciscans had not collected great art. To San Francisco’s male-dominated society there was something sissified about paintings. The Impressionists in particular seemed both effete and effeminate. A painting of a charging buffalo or the massacre of an Indian tribe, on the other hand, was something that a San Francisco businessman could relate to. As for Rodin’s sculpture, it was both massive and monumental. Here was no “decadent” Degas or Corot or Manet. There was no question but that “The Thinker” was thoroughly muscular and masculine. Rodin was the perfect sculptor for San Francisco of the 1920s.

  Still, though Alma Spreckels had the enthusiastic support of Mr. Hearst and the Examiner (while her endeavors were being virtually ignored by the Chronicle), and even though she had Rodin, she soon found that raising funds for her project would not be as easy as she had first supposed. Second-generation California rich, it seemed, were more interested in party-giving, opera-going, and being seen at the right tables in the Mural Room than in philanthropy. That was part of it. But part of it also had to do with Alma Spreckels’ almost overpoweringly imperious personal style. Like Mr. Hearst, she seemed to feel that she was above society, unaccountable to it, impervious to its little niceties and rules and regulations. She was chauffeured around town in a huge Rolls-Royce with basket-weave sides, her knees beneath a chinchilla lap-robe. She occasionally inspected the building site of her museum wearing one of her mountainous mink coats over nothing but a nightgown, her feet in bedroom slippers. She loved to shock. She liked to hold museum meetings in her bedroom, where she held court in a swan-shaped bed, and at one such gathering of distinguished civic leaders she opened the proceedings by announcing, “Guess what? I just found my cook in bed with the butler!” Once, during a lull in the conversation at a dinner party where the guests included impresario Sol Hurok, Mrs. Spreckels said suddenly in her loud voice, “Mr. Hurok, do you know why they won’t let Diaghilev dance in Russia?” Mr. Hurok did not know, and was no doubt bemused by the question, since Diaghilev, like Hurok, was an impresario, not a performer. “Because he won’t wear a jockstrap,” said Mrs. Spreckels.

  In addition to her booming voice she had a haughty, almost baleful stare which she would fix on anyone who displeased her. Considering Alma Spreckels’ origins and somewhat questionable past, San Francisco society found her more than a little hard to take. But she could not be ignored. Once, on a gallery-going trip to New York with her curator, Thomas Carr Howe, she asked him if he would like to go to the theater that night and, if so, what he would like to see. Howe replied that the great Broadway hit of the moment was Lady in the Dark, starring a new-found comedian named Danny Kaye. Howe added that he doubted that they could get tickets. Fifteen minutes later a messenger delivered tickets for two seats in the third row on the center aisle to Mrs. Spreckels’ suite. Mrs. Spreckels, however, was unimpressed by Danny Kaye. In the middle of the first act, in a hoarse stage whisper that could be heard through half the house as well as across the footlights, Mrs. Spreckels cupped her hand against Howe’s ear and declared, “Mr. Howe, I think Danny Kaye is a fairy!”

  She could, on the other hand, be gregarious and generous—if not to a fault, at least to a degree that was quite beyond the limits of San Francisco’s right-fork-conscious new high society. She was fond of asking acquaintances of both sexes to come for a swim with her in her indoor pool, invariably adding, “Of course, pet, I swim in the raw. Hope you don’t mind.” Those who had the temerity to accept her swimming invitations reported that she did indeed swim in the raw. Also, from time to time she liked having her chauffeur drop her off at various wharf-side saloons, where she enjoyed bellying up to the bar with sailors and stevedores and chatting with them in language even saltier than their own. She might be outrageous, but she was certainly not a snob. One afternoon, at the Spreckels country place, a huge ranch in Sonoma called Sobre Vista, a salesman selling pins and needles rang the doorbell. “See who’s there!” roared Mrs. Spreckels, and the salesman was ushered in. After a few moments of conversation Mrs. Spreckels asked, “Do you have a wife?” The salesman replied that he did. “Bring her over,” said Mrs. Spreckels. The salesman did, and he and his wife remained as Mrs. Spreckels’ houseguests for about a week.

  She had a passion for bridge and a passion for very cold, very dry martinis; an icy pitcherful was never far from her reach. Bridge tables were set up in every room of her San Francisco house—even in the bathrooms, and there were twenty-five of these, all of them capacious—to be ready wherever and whenever a foursome showed up. Parties were called at the drop of a hat, or even sooner. Once, after a small electrical fire had broken out in the house and the fire department had been called, Mrs. Spreckels’ family returned late at night to find the firemen sitting around and downing martinis with their hostess. But her martini consumption never prevented her from rising at dawn and tackling her day with the energy of a Southern Pacific freight locomotive. She once woke up Henry Ford at 6:30 in the morning to ask him to donate a Model T for a raffle she was having for her museum. She got her Model T.

  Pomp and formality and pretension bored her. When the late Elsa Maxwell, who considered herself both a San Franciscan and a social arbiter, once asked Mrs. Spreckels how old she was, Mrs. Spreckels replied, “Old enough to remember when there was no such person as Elsa Maxwell.” At a formal dinner that was followed by a long series of speeches—most of them extolling the civic virtues and cultural benefactions of Alma de Bretteville Spreckels—the honoree grew weary of the proceedings, and, turning to her companion, she asked in the familiar stage whisper, “Want to hear something dirty in Danish?” Her companion nodded, whereupon
Mrs. Spreckels muttered a guttural, incomprehensible epithet. “But what does it mean?” her companion whispered. “Fire up your behind!” shouted Mrs. Spreckels. At one time she was required to have a cystoscopy, and afterward she asked a dinner companion if he had ever had such an experience. Wincing, he replied that he had and that it had been very painful. “Christ,” said Mrs. Spreckels, “if they do that sort of thing to the rich, what do they do to the poor?” She also once said, “If I weren’t rich, people would say I was crazy. As it is, I’m just eccentric.”

  And she always got what she wanted. A luncheon guest at Sobre Vista once commented that the view from the terrace would probably be improved if a certain large tree were removed. The party then repaired to the dining room. After lunch the group gathered on the terrace again for coffee. The large tree was gone. It was the same way with her museum. When outside contributions proved insufficient for its construction, Mrs. Spreckels simply came up with her own money—some two million dollars all told before it was finished. She wanted an important Rodin collection. “The Thinker” was moved from Golden Gate Park to the museum’s courtyard, and Mrs. Spreckels also bought casts of such now famous Rodins as the “Prodigal Son” and the “Age of Bronze.” She bought some thirty-two other Rodin pieces, and by the time she had finished, the Rodin collection of the Legion of Honor was the largest in the Western Hemisphere. Inside the museum went French paintings, tapestries, rugs, porcelains, and crystal, all bought by Alma Spreckels. Influential friends were also helpful, including King Frederick and Queen Ingrid of Denmark. (“I’ve got a picture of them hanging in my bathroom,” she liked to say.) Queen Marie of Romania, on her famous tour of the United States, stopped to visit Mrs. Spreckels and presented to her a great deal of gold furniture, including the queen’s golden throne. (“Very comfortable throne,” said Mrs. Spreckels. “I kept some of the gold furniture out in my front hall for a while.”) Eventually, of course, all this furniture went to her museum. (“Actually, pet,” she once confided to a friend, “Queen Marie didn’t exactly give that furniture to me. I bought it from her.”)