California Rich

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  When the Palace of the Legion of Honor opened its doors in November 1924, with a great ceremony attended by everyone of importance in the city (except the de Youngs), as well as by dignitaries and government officials representing both the United States and France, the occasion was such that not even the Chronicle could afford to ignore it. It was an international event. The great white marble Palace dominated Inspiration Point, a cultural capstone to a city that wished to create the illusion, at least, that it treasured culture above all other virtues (though, in fact, there were certain other obvious priorities). Throughout the dedication speeches and ceremonies there was only one sad note. Alma de Bretteville Spreckels was in widow’s weeds. Adolph Spreckels had not lived to see the result of his wife’s labors and his money. He had died in June of that year at the age of sixty-seven.

  Though Spreckels and de Young were now both dead, the rivalry between the two museums went on for years, abetted by the partisanship of the Chronicle and the Examiner. Whenever a piece of art became available for acquisition, Mrs. Spreckels would cry, “Get it before the de Young!” In a sense the competitiveness of the two museums served them both well in that it made each try harder to obtain the best pieces and to display the best exhibits. But the tendency of each paper to run down the competition’s product probably resulted in simply confusing the museum-going public and prompted at least one East Coast observer to comment, “If you put the two San Francisco museums together, you’d end up with one mediocre museum.”

  Early on, William Randolph Hearst had hired the brimstone-pen writer Ambrose Bierce as his art critic and had instructed him to write disparagingly of any exhibition presented at the de Young Museum. Bierce complied and had written of a typical de Young show that the quality of the art, “while always detestable, has this year attained a shining pinnacle of badness. The pictures next year will necessarily be better than the pictures of this, but alas, there may be be more of them.” Later Examiner art critics followed the Bierce example.

  A great deal has been written about the demonic and despotic William Randolph Hearst, who treated kings and copyboys with the same disdain and impartiality. Yet those who knew him as a friend and host remember W.R., or “The Chief,” as he was called, as a kindly, rather shy and self-effacing man, full of uncertainties, whose primary wish seemed to be to make his guests feel comfortable and happy. Once, after visiting Hearst at San Simeon, The New Yorker editor Harold Ross commented, “I went expecting to meet Dracula, and went away feeling that I’d met Mr. Chips.” For years rumors circulated that Hearst had people killed who displeased him, and in particular that he poisoned (or shot, according to another version) movie producer Thomas Ince, who died shortly after dining on Hearst’s yacht, for making a pass at Marion Davies. Miss Davies herself denied the stories. Mr. Hearst’s guests and acquaintances, she explained, fell into four categories. “Either men worshiped W.R., or they worked for him, or they were our guests and gentlemen, or they hated W.R.’s guts but were scared of him,” she explained. None of these categories of men would have dreamed of making a pass at her.

  Hearst’s one great character flaw—if, indeed, it was not a diagnosable neurosis—may have been that he was a compulsive spender. He acquired things wildly and erratically, buying priceless and worthless objects with the same reckless abandon. Like an alcoholic or a drug addict, he seemed to need a daily “fix” from spending huge sums of money. He bought rooms of castles, ceilings, frescoes, chandeliers, suits of armor, statues, paintings, tapestries, and enormous amounts of bric-a-brac that could only be described as junk. A psychologist would doubtless find in all this an expression of some deep and terrible insecurity. Over the years this ferocious habit escalated, and in the cavernous basement vaults of San Simeon, as well as in warehouses across the country, great crates of Hearst purchases piled up, many of them never opened. In the end his buying consumed him. The well of the Hearst fortune was not, as it had once seemed, bottomless. Though his publishing and motion picture empire yielded tens of millions of dollars a year in profits, they were eventually insufficient to support his habit, which, as it would turn out, would provide an ironic twist to San Francisco’s great museum war.

  When Hearst died in 1951 he was at Miss Davies’ house in Beverly Hills. Miss Davies, according to her late account, had been up caring for him and reading to him much of the night and had taken a sleeping pill, so that when the end came she was in deep slumber. She may of course have been intoxicated. During his final illness Mr. Hearst had not been able to control Marion’s drinking problem, as he had struggled to do for over twenty years. In fact, he disliked anyone who drank and tried to control the drinking of everyone with whom he came in contact. At San Simeon, beer was served with lunch, and before dinner a cocktail—or occasionally two—was offered, along with copious hors d’oeuvres, including huge bowls of caviar. Wine was served with dinner, and after dinner, following the inevitable screening of a Hearst motion picture, usually starring Miss Davies, a guest might be lucky enough to be offered a goodnight highball. Aside from that, Hearst’s evenings were nonalcoholic, and any guest who appeared to be intoxicated received an icy stare from the host and was told, “A car is waiting to take you to the night train.” At dinner the Hearst butlers were instructed not to refill Miss Davies’ wineglass. Once, when the butler had passed behind her chair without offering her more wine, she cried out, “Oh, please, W.R., let me have some more champagne! After all, I never get cross at you when you drink.” “That is correct,” replied the host. “You only get cross at me when you drink.” To offset this situation Miss Davies kept a secret cache of liquor in the ladies’ dressing room, where it was stored in perfume bottles. Women guests repaired there to freshen their drinks.

  In any case, when the nurses at Hearst’s bedside realized that he had died, Miss Davies could not be roused from sleep. A few days earlier, to try to prevent a financial debacle, she had lent him a million dollars. The first person notified of his death was Hearst’s widow, and by the time Marion Davies awoke, Hearst executives had removed The Chief’s body and every scrap of his possessions from her house. After thirty-two years as his mistress-companion-nurse, she was not permitted to bid him a final farewell. Nor was she allowed to attend his funeral in San Francisco. Millicent Hearst and her sons took charge of all arrangements. Though Marion had been specifically named in Hearst’s will as the sole voting power in the Hearst Corporation, pressure from the family forced her to relinquish that right.

  The family then set about trying to recoup as much of Hearst’s exhausted fortune as it could by auctioning and selling off his vast accumulation of acquisitions. Because of Hearst’s liaison with Miss Davies, the Hearsts had for years been denied a listing in the San Francisco Social Register, and the family now set about trying to redeem themselves and their tarnished image in the eyes of San Francisco society. This they decided to do by presenting a particularly impressive collection of tapestries to the city. To the astonishment of everyone who was aware of the long Hearst–de Young feud, the gift was made to the de Young Museum.

  The choice of the de Young may have been capricious. Or it may have been perverse, a way of notifying such of Mr. Hearst’s old friends as Mrs. Spreckels that they no longer wielded any power over his family. Of course the Chronicle fairly crowed with this news. Had Hearst himself been aware of it he would surely have been spinning furiously in his grave. The de Young Museum, on accepting the tapestries, announced that they would be displayed in an especially created new gallery to be called the Hearst Court. To the delighted de Young family it seemed as though the de Youngs had finally triumphed over William Randolph Hearst.

  If Alma Spreckels was angry or even disappointed over these developments, she was wise enough to remain silent on the subject.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Silver Kings and Other Royalty

  Though the families of the famous Big Four of the Southern Pacific and Union Pacific railroads—the Crockers, Huntingtons, Hopkinses, and St
anfords—had managed to glide more or less effortlessly into San Francisco’s high society of culture and refinement, a second Big Four—the so-called Silver Kings—had more difficulty. It was a question of occupational status. Railroads, after all, were somehow a respectable endeavor. Railroads provided a comfortable and fashionable form of travel. Every really rich man had his private railway car. Everyone also invested in railroad stocks, which virtually had the endorsement of the United States government. Mining, on the other hand, was pick-and-shovel stuff, an occupation for roughnecks and gamblers. Most of the overnight gold and silver fortunes had been frittered or gambled away as rapidly as they had been made. Even John Sutter, on whose property California gold had first been discovered, setting off the gold rush, had died a poor man living in a boardinghouse on a meager pension.

  The Silver Kings—or the Irish Big Four, as they were sometimes called—were James C. Flood, William S. O’Brien, James Gordon Fair, and John William Mackay. Jim Flood, described by Dixon Wecter as a “poor gamin of the New York streets,” had, like so many of his contemporaries, gone west with the gold rush. But instead of heading for the hills as others did, Flood settled for the ramshackle village with rutted streets—whose hilltop mansions still looked incongruous and out of place on the frontier-town horizon—that was then downtown San Francisco. In San Francisco, Flood met another Irishman, Will O’Brien, and the two pooled their small resources to set themselves up in a storefront bar and grill called the Auction Lunch Rooms. It got its name from the Gold Exchange, near which it was located. Flood’s job was to mix the drinks, which he did in generous proportions, and O’Brien worked behind the stove, where he soon received a certain neighborhood celebrity for his Irish fish chowder, thick with potatoes. The Auction Lunch Rooms soon became a popular gathering place for traders on the exchange, as well as for miners, who periodically came down from the hills to disport themselves in the city’s fancy houses and to partake of hearty food and drink.

  Inevitably, in addition to cooking and bartending, the two partners were able to eavesdrop on certain gold-related conversations, and, lubricated by whiskey, the miners and the traders occasionally revealed more about their business than they should have. It wasn’t long before Flood and O’Brien, who had never set foot in a mining camp, had developed a fairly good feel for gold and silver mining. One particularly promising tip concerned the Comstock area outside Virginia City. And so, taking in two Irish friends, John Mackay and Jim Fair, as partners to provide further financial backing, the foursome set off for Virginia City to stake a claim. It was one of those rare occasions when a prospector’s very first explorations yielded a bonanza, and the Comstock was even more than that. What the foursome discovered was the largest and most valuable single pocket of silver ever unearthed in the world—a huge vein of shiny metal some fifty feet wide. The initial estimates of the value of the Comstock Lode placed it at $300,000,000, but even that turned out to be on the low side. From its discovery in 1859 until its final depletion ten years later, the Comstock would yield, all told, over $500,000,000 worth of silver, making Flood, Fair, Mackey, and O’Brien four of the world’s richest men.

  William O’Brien took his share of the Comstock riches and retired to lead a quiet, unpublicized life. He had no use for society and was content simply to nurse his fortune. Not so Jim Flood. Perhaps no other individual in the history of American capitalism catapulted himself from squalor to glittering splendor in so short a time as the ex-bartender, who shared the glitter with his wife, a former chambermaid. Instant riches, to Flood, demanded instant luxury, and one of his first orders was for the construction of a massive brownstone mansion at the very top of Nob Hill, catercorner to the Mark Hopkins mansion. (Flood’s house was so sturdily built that it was one of the few buildings in the city to survive the great earthquake and fire of 1906.) 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.” It was seven stories high, surrounded by porches, painted white, and topped by a huge square tower supporting a pyramid that resembled the Eiffel Tower. So much carpeting was required to cover the floors of these two houses that John Sloane, the carpet dealer from New York who was brought in to handle the job, had to station representatives in California to supervise the carpet-laying, and soon found it simpler and more economical just to open a branch of his store in San Francisco.

  Still, for all their display, the James Floods did not find it easy to break into San Francisco society. They were considered “uncultivated” and “lacking in refinement,” as, to be sure, they were. Flood had to have his valet give him instructions on how to tie a necktie, though Mrs. Flood, who had waited on ladies of the gentlefolk, had learned some lessons in comme il faut. The Floods were fortunate, however, in that they had a beautiful daughter. Jennie Flood became an instant belle of San Francisco, famous for her fine dark hair, her wit, charm, and devastatingly large and flashing eyes. All the most eligible bachelors in the city were at Jennie’s feet, and the Floods were certain that Jennie would marry well. In 1879, Jennie Flood was courted by no less than a United States President’s son, Ulysses S. Grant, Jr., and the prospect of this match so pleased her father that he promised to build the pair an immense château in Newport as a wedding present. Alas, young Grant, it seemed, had an eye for all the ladies of the moment, and, returning from a trip east, he delayed so long in reaching Jennie Flood’s house—“dallying along the way with Dora Miller and other adorables,” as the Chronicle’s society writer put it—that Jennie angrily broke the engagement. Later she was admired and squired about by the British Lord Beaumont, and once more the Floods’ hopes for a brilliant match were raised. But Lord Beaumont’s courtship came to nothing, and in the end Jennie Flood never married anyone at all and died a spinster. She remained, however, a colorful and popular figure in San Francisco.

  James Gordon Fair, meanwhile, earned the distinction of being the least likable of the Irish Four; he had managed to earn the nickname of “Slippery Jim” very early in his career. Born in Belfast in 1831, Jim Fair came first to Chicago at the age of twelve, and then moved westward at the age of eighteen. By the age of thirty, with his Comstock millions, he had a mill in Nevada, where he became chiefly responsible for driving San Franciscans out of Nevada development—making many enemies in the process—which he then managed to take over himself. 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 had one particularly nasty habit. He enjoyed giving misleading tips on the stock market. Jim Fair’s acquaintances soon learned that if Fair recommended a stock it was certain to go down, but before discovering this fact a number of people had been stung. In 1861, Fair married an Irish girl named Theresa Rooney, by whom he had four children—Theresa (Tessie), Virginia (Birdie), Charles, and James. At one point Mrs. Fair asked her husband to recommend a stock in which she could invest some money. Jim Fair then gave her a surefire tip, adding that she must promise not to tell any of her friends. Fair knew that his voluble wife could not keep a secret, and so Mrs. Fair and all her friends invested in the stock in question. It soon became worthless. “That,” declared Fair, “will teach you a lesson.” For this and other reasons Mrs. Fair divorced him and received custody of all the children except young James. Fair’s namesake hated and dreaded his father, and soon after the divorce he committed suicide. Charles Fair made a youthful marriage that so displeased his father that he disinherited him, and shortly afterward young Charles and his bride were killed in an automobile accident. Both Birdie and Tessie made “brilliant” society marriages: Birdie married William K. Vanderbilt and Tessie married Hermann Oelrichs. Both girls specified that their father not be invited to their weddings, and as it came about, both marriages turned out unhappily. Birdie and Vanderbilt’s ended in divorce. Tessie’s marriage lasted, and Tessie went on to b
ecome one of the reigning dowagers of Newport, but she had always shown signs of mental instability. She had great manic rages, followed by black depressions. In her manic periods she would try to set fire to the curtains of her house. In her depressions she would remain in her bed for days. In the end she was declared insane.

  Slippery Jim Fair became an alcoholic and, in the process, a bigamist. On various drunken sprees he took a series of women to the altar, promising each of them a share of his fortune. Following these marriages, he would disappear and his various wives would attempt to find him. In his last years Fair lived alone in a San Francisco hotel, solitary, bitter, completely without friends and estranged from his entire family. When he died in 1894 at the age of sixty-three 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.

  In the second generation the Flood family also had financial problems brought on by romance. In the 1930s a young woman sued Jim Flood’s son, James L. Flood, claiming she was his illegitimate daughter. And it turned out that she was. Witnesses appeared to testify that they had seen James Flood wheeling the child up and down the street in a baby carriage. She was awarded seven and a half million dollars.

  By far the most attractive, and probably the most talented, of the Irish quartet was John William Mackay. Mackay was a tall, slender, handsome man with deep-set eyes, a gentle nature, and a generous heart. After his first important strike in the mother lode, in which he made two hundred thousand dollars, he announced that this was enough money for any man and that “the man who wanted more than that was a fool.” He had gone into the Comstock venture with more capital than his other partners and as a result had a two-fifths share of that bonanza—a fact that doubtless caused him to raise his estimate of how much money a prudent man needed. He had been born in Dublin in 1831 into a virtually penniless family, and at the age of nine, at the onset of the great potato famine, had emigrated to America. 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. The rest he asked for in stock in the mining company.