California Rich

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  It was clear that East Coast women of noble rank outweighed those of the West Coast, and California was determined to catch up. By contrast, the social scene in San Francisco did seem a little primitive. For the debut of John D. Spreckels’ daughters, Grace and Lillie, in 1899, the party was held at the Native Sons’ Hall. Five hundred and fifty guests danced to the strains of Rosner’s Hungarian Orchestra, which was hidden behind a bank of palms and ferns. In 1905, in the announcement of Grace Spreckels’ engagement to Alexander Hamilton—no kin to the American Revolutionary statesman but a member of the family that owned the Baker & Hamilton Hardware Store—it was noted that the bride-to-be had “mastered the art of safely and successfully driving an automobile.”

  The first San Francisco woman to outfit herself with a foreign title was not, as it turned out, a member of one of the Big Four families or even a member of Eleanor Martin’s set. She was none other than Flora Sharon, Will Sharon’s daughter, whose father now owned the Palace Hotel. An aging Briton named Sir Thomas George Fermor-Hesketh had arrived in San Francisco aboard his yacht, the Lancashire Witch, had checked into the Palace, and, according to the story, had spotted Flora Sharon in an elevator. Sir Thomas made inquiries, and when the Lancashire Witch departed for England, Flora was Lady Hesketh, wife of the seventh baronet of Lancaster. Before the marriage William Sharon had settled a dowry of five million dollars on Flora. The year was 1880, and San Francisco saw how easily titles were acquired. One just bought them.

  In the years that followed Flora Sharon’s triumph San Francisco went on a regular title-shopping spree, going about it—in typical California fashion—with cheerful abandon, with money no object, throwing caution to the winds. Eleanor Martin’s sister, Anna Donahue, decided that her daughter Mary Ellen needed a title and set about interviewing likely bachelors from the Almanach de Gotha. In 1883, Mrs. Donahue settled on the Prussian Baron Heinrich von Schroeder. At this point the Crockers, not to be upstaged, arranged for Mrs. Crocker’s sister, Beth Sperry, of the little river town of Stockton, to become the Princess Poniatowski, wife of a prince who claimed descent from the kings of Poland. Clara Huntington, Collis Huntington’s adopted daughter, and John Mackay’s daughter, Eva, were friends—on the surface at least. When it came to men they were fiercely competitive. Both now wanted titles, and their mothers agreed that they should have them, though John Mackay was far from enthusiastic about the whole title-hunting craze. For a while the two young women were in a neck-and-neck position to capture the prize of Prince von Hatzfeld-Wildenberg. Clara Huntington got him in 1889, for a reported price of five million dollars, which seemed to have become the going rate. Eva Mackay was next reported engaged to Philippe de Bourbon, but this rumor turned out to be false. Eventually it was announced that Eva would marry Prince Fernando Galatro-Colonna of Naples, which she did, and both new princesses agreed that they had come out equally, though Princess Eva ran away from her prince eight years later and never returned.

  Perhaps the most astonishing California success story of the kind concerned Maud Burke of San Francisco. Tiny and plain, with an enormous nose and mouse-colored hair, and, according to a contemporary report, a fondness for wearing “more maquillage than her poor, pointed face could bear,” she was nonetheless extraordinarily ambitious. Having failed socially in both her native city and New York, she followed the Mackay example and tried London, backed financially by a wealthy uncle. Here, having changed her name from Maud—which she had always hated—to Emerald, she became enormously popular. Despite her appearance she had discovered that all-important key to social success—a kind of perpetual motion. She was so intensely animated that she could not be overlooked in any gathering, and her rapid-fire, almost nonstop manner of speaking—coupled with a fine mastery of the art of gossip—quickly earned her a reputation as a wit. No lexicon of the bons mots of Emerald Burke survives her, nor is it likely that one will be compiled, because nothing she said was really funny. The secret was in her delivery.

  Unlike her California sisters who had to pay for their titles, Emerald found one, in the elderly sportsman Sir Bache Cunard (of the steamship-company Cunards), who was not only a peer of the realm but also an extremely rich man. As the fabled Lady Emerald Cunard she became, over the next forty years, one of the dominant social forces in England and one of London’s most powerful and popular hostesses. In the early 1930s she was a pivotal figure in “the Prince of Wales set” and was one of the principals in the heady swirl of events surrounding the prince’s romance with Mrs. Wallis Warfield Spencer Simpson. Following Edward VIII’s abdication, most of his former set quickly turned their backs on him and transferred their allegiance to the new monarch and his wife. But Emerald Cunard’s position was more secure. In fact, the new queen is supposed to have said, shortly after George VI’s succession to the throne, that she was afraid she and her husband would never be included in any of Emerald Cunard’s entertainments. “You see,” she said, “Emerald has so often said that Bertie and I are not fashionable.”

  In San Francisco all these marital developments drew a mixed reaction from the press. On the one hand, the titled marriages were always fully reported with as much enthusiastic detail as might be used to describe a great American victory in a major war. But some sour notes were sounded too. From his society-gossip columnist’s desk at Hearst’s Examiner the irascible William Chambliss was particularly acid. To Chambliss, these marriages to “foreigners” represented a grave economic threat to the state of California, if not to the entire country. He saw good red-blooded American money being leaked out of the country in which it had been made. He wrote:

  A complete list of all the marriages of American women to titled men, for the past thirty-five years, shows that at least two hundred million dollars have gone away from this country in that period.… California has had more than her share to bear. Seven California girls have taken away from this state alone nearly twenty millions of dollars, or ten per cent of the entire amount, in exchange for seven titles, most of which are both shabby and shop worn.

  Prince Colonna has probably cost, up to date, in the neighborhood of five million dollars. Prince Hatzfedt [sic] an equal if not larger sum. Prince Poniatowski came cheaper: a quarter of a million was about his price. Viscount Deerhurst and Lord Hesketh cost in the neighborhood of two and five million dollars respectively. The dot of Lord Wolesley’s California bride was probably something under a million, but with moderate luck Sir Bache Cunard will get some two millions of old man Carpentier’s accumulation of dollars, as his bride, Miss Burke, is the Outland Capitalist’s favorite niece and should come in for a large slice of his estate.

  At the time the above was written the granddaughter of Darius Ogden Mills (the director of the Bank of California who had carried the bad news to William Ralston) had not yet married the Earl of Granard. Had that happened sooner, Chambliss would doubtless have accused Californians of contributing an even larger share of cash to the European money drain.

  And yet the infusion of aristocratic European blood into the roughhewn stock of the California pioneers may have had at least one desired and desirable effect. It may have helped Californians acquire, or at least make them aware of, such Old World qualities as gentility and taste. It may have helped them appreciate quiet understatement, whereas before that the California rich had relied primarily on garish ostentation and flashy shows to make it clear that they had money. The 1880 wedding of Flora Sharon to Sir Thomas Fermor-Hesketh was a glaring example of the latter. Held at Belmont, the huge white palace near San Mateo inherited by the bride’s father, it took place in the inevitable music room, 70 feet long and 24 feet wide, lined with floor-to-ceiling mirrors and lighted by three thirty-branch crystal chandeliers in an attempt to put the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles into the shadows. The Sharon house, which, like the hotel, had once belonged to William Ralston, contained other interesting features. It had an even one hundred bedrooms. All the doorknobs were of sterling silver. In Ralston’s day he had loved pointin
g out to his guests the features of the house, such as the clever device that opened the main gates. When one approached the house, across a short bridge, the weight of the carriage on the bridge triggered a mechanism that swung open the heavy iron gates into the big entrance courtyard. All of this, along with the furnishings, now belonged to the Sharons.

  One hundred and fifty guests had been invited to the ceremony, and eight hundred more to the reception following it, and preparations had been made to handle thousands of the general and curious public who were expected to line the drives and fill the lawns of the estate for a glimpse of the proceedings.

  The weather was terrible. “The winds whistled through the little valley,” the Examiner wrote. “The swiftly falling rain was blown in slanting sheets against the windows of the mansion and along the wide, hard driveway to the village. In the shadow of the hills the great trees quivered and shed their load of vaporous surcharge.” Notwithstanding the rain, and whatever the vaporous surcharge was that was coming from the trees, throngs of people showed up. Two special trains had been engaged to carry the guests to Belmont from San Francisco. At the San Francisco station a woman guest, magnificently dressed in white silk from head to toe, tried to jump from the running board of her carriage to the curb and landed on her hands and knees in a pool of mud. Before the press could identify her she had climbed back into her carriage shouting unprintable words. At the Belmont railroad station forty carriages stood in readiness to convey the guests to the house. When the trains arrived at Belmont, there was a mad and furious rush for seats in the carriages, with much pushing and shoving. In the confusion one woman guest was pushed through some trestlework and landed in a gravel pit six feet below.

  The Sharon house had been overpowered with decorations for the occasion. As the Examiner described it: “How profuse were the decorations may be inferred when it is stated that all the rarest plants of the greeneries, covering more than a city block in extent, had been gracefully disposed and festooned round the rooms. Every pillar of the many in the house was invisible for the smilax and camellias with which they had been covered. Boxes of evergreens, hanging baskets of shrubs and cut flowers had been again gracefully disposed in all the rooms.”

  The Examiner then filled two more columns of breathless print with what the guests ate, and still more with the wedding presents, one of which was a painting by Humphrey Moore: “Entitled ‘El Bolero,’ it represents a scene in a room of the Alhambra; a lover, whilst playing the guitar, is at the same time gazing with pleased admiration upon a beautiful animated creature in the graceful attitude of the dance. To place this inspiration upon canvas required but the work of three days, very wonderful proof of the eminent artist’s dexterity.”

  In striking contrast, a generation later, was the 1909 celebration of another of San Francisco’s intramural marriages. Flora Sharon’s brother Fred, who had been an usher at the Sharon-Hesketh wedding, had married Mrs. Witherspoon Breckinridge, who had been a Tevis, the daughter of San Francisco’s Lloyd Tevis. Thus Fred Sharon became the stepfather of Miss Flora Louise Breckinridge. Flora Louise was now marrying the elder son of Sir Thomas and Lady Flora Hesketh, thus joining in wedlock Lady Flora’s son and her stepniece. The wedding took place in Paris and was attended only by the bride’s mother and stepfather, the groom’s parents, and a small handful of Tevis relatives.

  San Francisco’s rich seemed finally to be learning how to relax with their money.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Mother and Children

  Alma Spreckels seemed to thrive on building museums. In addition to the Palace of the Legion of Honor, she built the Maryhill Museum in the state of Washington and contributed a large collection to it. She next built the San Francisco Maritime Museum and gave it a collection. At the time of her death, even though she cared little for music, she was working on assembling a collection devoted to the dance and theater, which was to form the nucleus of yet a fourth museum.

  Alma Spreckels always became deeply and personally involved with all her projects. While developing her Maritime Museum, for example, she heard of a retired seaman who built ship models. She found him, appropriately enough, in a waterfront bar; they became friends, and she spent many afternoons in the bar with him while he whittled. When he died, Mrs. Spreckels went to his funeral, where she met his widow, and offered to pay for the burial. The widow demurred, but Mrs. Spreckels thrust a wad of bills into her hand anyway. Then she went back to the old sailor’s favorite saloon haunt and bought drinks all around.

  During World War II she was a virtual dynamo. The cavernous garages of her Washington Street house were turned into a salvage shop, which she ran for the benefit of at least five different causes and which, among other things, raised over $170,000 for the Red Cross. When the Nazis overran Denmark, Alma Spreckels organized an appeal to the people of San Francisco and raised millions of dollars for medical supplies and relief funds. During the war her doctor, William Lister (Lefty) Rogers, was a naval medical officer, and at one point, when his ship was in port in San Francisco, Rogers complained to her of the ship’s lack of much needed surgical supplies. Immediately Mrs. Spreckels ordered the required equipment. It had not arrived by the time Rogers’s ship was due to depart, but it did arrive a few hours afterward. Mrs. Spreckels dispatched a speedboat to catch up with the navy battleship in the Pacific and deliver the equipment.

  Throughout the war Mrs. Spreckels and her San Francisco League for Service Men entertained San Francisco-based servicemen and their wives. She furnished every service wife with an electric washing machine from what was apparently an inexhaustible supply. To the servicemen she gave thousands of footballs, baseball bats, and radios. She also provided musical instruments for no less than one hundred and seventy-six military bands. Still, her primary interest remained art and artists. During the First World War, for example, she became interested in an impoverished sculptor named Putnam. Through a friend Mrs. Spreckels arranged to have Putnam’s sculptures shipped to France to be cast—despite the U-boats.

  She was not, for all her philanthropy, a very practical woman. The mainstay of her fortune was a trust amounting to about $10,000,000, which had been created for her by her husband and from which she received an income of about $750,000 a year. (“Remember, pet, I’m in trust!” she would warn people who came to her for contributions.) She frequently overspent her income and was forever borrowing from banks to make ends meet. Once her trustees came to her and suggested that the trust sell a certain stock in which it had a strong position. Mrs. Spreckels opposed selling the stock, but the trustees outvoted her. She thereupon bought up the stock in question with her own money. It went down. She often seemed to have only a vague idea of the value of things. Accompanying her for a drive in her car one day, a friend commented on a pin Mrs. Spreckels was wearing, saying, “My dear, what beautiful jade!” Mrs. Spreckels studied the pin as though she had never seen it before and finally said, “God damn it, those are emeralds!” She did indeed have quite a large collection of jade pieces, and once, at a party, a guest in a festive mood slipped into his pocket a jade carving displayed on a table, thinking that this would be a great joke. Typically, the hostess never noticed the missing object, and, the next morning, thinking better of his prank, the guest returned the jade piece to her in the center of a flower arrangement. Mrs. Spreckels gave the flowers a cursory glance and sent the arrangement off to a local hospital. A few days later she received a letter of thanks from the hospital, acknowledging the flowers and “particularly the exquisite jade carving which, we have determined, may bring in excess of ten thousand dollars.”

  On her ranch in the Napa Valley she was equally casual. As a special gift, one of her house guests gave Mrs. Spreckels a pair of prize laying hens. Her cook prepared them for Sunday dinner. When motoring on the Peninsula, Mrs. Spreckels was fond of stopping at a favorite French restaurant called L’Omelette near Palo Alto. She and her party were always given front-and-center treatment at L’Omelette, where, sweeping
in through ranks of bowing waiters and captains, she was always placed at a special table. One night, however, a Thursday, Mrs. Spreckels and a guest arrived—as usual, unannounced—to find the restaurant filled to capacity, with a long waiting line for tables. Spotting her immediately—which was easy to do because of her height—the headwaiter hurried over to her with apologies, “I’m terribly sorry, Mrs. Spreckels, but it’s Thursday—cooks’ night out.” Mrs. Spreckels looked confused. “Do you mean,” she said, “that all these people are cooks?”

  Like many rich people who enjoy being philanthropic, Mrs. Spreckels did not enjoy being asked for money outright. No one knew this better than her Legion of Honor curator, Thomas Howe. But when the staff of the Legion was organizing a baseball team, it found itself fifty dollars short of the amount needed to buy uniforms. The team, wondering whether the Legion’s wealthy benefactress might be willing to make the needed contribution, approached Mr. Howe. Howe, who had never asked Mrs. Spreckels for money before, had misgivings, but he knew that Mrs. Spreckels herself was a baseball fan, and the amount was small. He brought the matter up with her at one of their regular meetings, explaining that the team intended to call itself the Adolph B. Spreckels Memorial Baseball Team. Mrs. Spreckels nodded approvingly. Then Howe brought up the matter of the fifty dollars. “What!” cried Mrs. Spreckels. She flung open her reticule and poured its contents—lipstick, emery boards, matches, a few coins, a handkerchief—onto the table. “Where do you expect me to get fifty dollars?” she cried. “My God, you people have got my skin. Now you want my guts.”