California Rich

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  In the end only Abraham Ruef’s sentence—for accepting a two-hundred-thousand-dollar bribe to arrange the street railway franchise—was allowed to stand. Perhaps it was because he was Jewish and had never been acceptable in Eleanor Martin’s circle. He served a four-year-seven-month sentence in San Quentin. When he came out of prison he still seemed to have plenty of money, and one of the first things he threatened to do was to build an apartment house that would block Rudolph Spreckels’ view of the Bay.

  So much for reform and reformers in San Francisco. What the reformers had forgotten was that San Francisco had been built on graft and corruption and that by 1906 these practices had become as characteristic of the city as its precious views. The city’s business leaders never forgave Rudolph Spreckels for trying to tamper with the established scheme of things, and—who knows?—he may have been lucky that he was not murdered himself.

  As for James Duval Phelan, his bitter attack in 1929 on the board of the Palace of the Legion of Honor may have been his last-gasp attempt to get back at the San Francisco establishment, as well as at the Adolph Spreckels branch of the family, whom Rudolph had always hated and who had always hated Rudolph. And the art controversy that Phelan stirred up may have done him in. He died shortly afterward, in 1930, at the age of sixty-nine.

  Meanwhile the crash of 1929 had brought on the collapse of Rudolph’s First National Bank, which in its heyday was said to have provided him with an income of eighteen million dollars a year. In 1934 he was declared bankrupt. He moved to a tiny apartment in San Mateo, where he died in 1958 at the age of eighty-six. He liked to remind his few remaining friends that when his financial ruin had come, at least he had not jumped out a window.

  * An artistic word for “portraits.”

  † San Francisco Call, July 13, 1929.

  * San Francisco Call, July 13, 1929.

  * Frances Moffat, Dancing on the Brink of the World.

  PART THREE

  BLOOD AND WATER

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  J.I.’s Land

  Though very few of California’s “old” country and ranch houses are old in the sense, say, of old houses in Philadelphia or Newport or Boston, one way to recognize a California house that at least predates the era of air conditioning is to observe whether it is built high off the ground (sometimes even on stilts) and is approached by a long flight of steps—precautions against the seasonal floods that used to occur in Central Valley regions. Also, early California houses generally are surrounded by large trees, stout palms and tall stands of eucalyptus. These trees, planted close by, quickly overreached the structures and eventually protected the houses from the dry, hot summer winds. This was the way James Irvine, Jr.—the irascible J.I.—landscaped the white frame two-story “mansion” that he built on his ranch in 1900. Some twenty-five years earlier J.I.’s father had bought out his partners for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars—a bargain, as the value of the Irvine ranch would eventually be placed as high as a billion dollars and would make J.I. one of the richest men in California. The mansion—really no more than a large, comfortably furnished ranch house that would grow, with additions, to contain thirty rooms—would become the principal setting for family discord, strife, and tragedy for nearly three-quarters of a century.

  From the upstairs veranda of his mansion J.I. liked to survey his domain—one hundred and thirty-eight square miles of southern California land, the largest landholding in Orange County. He strolled the upper veranda like a sea captain patrolling the bridge of a great ship, ever on the lookout for poachers, trespassers, and other unwanted intruders. For all his gruff and unpredictable temper, he was a handsome man, and vain, proud of his broad shoulders, flat stomach, and Teddy Roosevelt mustache. In 1892 he had married a pretty Cleveland girl named Frances Anita Plum, who, like him, was an amateur painter, and she had promptly done what he expected of her and had borne him three children, two of them—much to his satisfaction—sons: James III, who was nicknamed Jase, Kathryn, and Myford, whom his parents called Mike. Though J.I. was a domineering husband and father, it was clear that his wife and children worshiped him. And it was clear that he loved them too, though he showed it in curious ways—such as bellowing noisy curses and imprecations at them when they failed to kiss him goodnight.

  For the first few years of their marriage J.I. and Frances Anita and the children lived principally in a large house on Pierce Street in San Francisco, with J.I. making periodic trips to southern California to inspect the operations of the ranch. After the 1906 fire, however, J.I. decreed that the city was a perilous place to raise children. Also, he had begun to feel that the children—particularly the boys—were becoming too citified and needed the rigors of ranch life to toughen them up. So he ordered the family moved south, to the mansion, for at least six months of the year.

  The ranch was then a vast and in some ways desolate place, plagued by drought as well as floods and scorched periodically by the strangely debilitating Santa Ana winds, which, when they occurred, seemed to take the life out of the air and penetrate the marrow of one’s bones. In these hot, dry periods, fires in the hills were a constant danger, and a single spark could cause an entire mountainside to explode in flames. Except for the ranch hands and staff, there was little companionship. The nearest neighbors were miles away, the nearest town, Los Angeles, thirty-five miles distant, a three-hour drive over primitive roads. In this bleak scheme of things a rancher spent most of his days fighting the weather.

  There were hard times. In 1888 another Great Drought had reduced the herds of J.I.’s sheep from 50,000 to 12,000, and J.I. decided to phase out his sheep-ranching operation and to concentrate on crops—hay and grain, lima and black-eyed beans, grapes, barley, walnut trees, and citrus, thousands of acres of Valencia oranges—and thereafter he grew steadily richer.

  But then fate seemed to prepare a revenge against J.I. for his hard ways, and the first of a number of deaths occurred when Frances Anita Irvine died suddenly of pneumonia in 1909—three years after J.I. had moved her to the mansion—leaving J.I. a widower at forty-two. Soon afterward he left his three young children in charge of a governess and embarked on a trip around the world—the first, as it would turn out, of many solitary travels to distant places in an apparent effort to escape the memory of his young wife.

  On his periodic returns to the ranch he would invariably bring with him exotic seeds and seedlings to see how well they would do on the land. But in other respects J.I. seemed to have undergone some kind of personality change. He had always been autocratic, but now he appeared at times demonic. His rages became legendary, and among his workmen he was hated and feared. Once one of his foremen, Raymond Willsey, came to him with a problem about laborers who were too drunk after payday to show up for work. “Weed ’em out!” said J.I. “But some of those guys have been with us twelve years or more,” Willsey argued. J.I.’s answer was final: “I don’t care if they’ve been here thirty years. If they’re not on the job, get ’em off the payroll.” When the men failed to heed Willsey’s warning, sixteen were fired in a day.

  J.I. developed a cruel streak and seemed to love to cause discomfort to others. He liked to hunt quail and was inevitably followed about by as many as half a dozen retrievers and their puppies. At one point J.I.’s pack of hunting dogs reached a grand total of fifty-six animals, and his ranch veterinarian would deliver five or six dogs each evening to the mansion, on a rotating basis, to keep him company. The Irvine hounds were not housebroken, and J.I. insisted on bringing his pack with him when he went on social and business calls and was greatly amused when the big dogs lifted their legs on rugs and furniture. Because he suspected that local hostesses invited him to their houses more for his money than his charm, he saw to it that the charm was nonexistent. When invited to formal dinner parties he would bring his dogs with him and, when seated at the table—with the dogs scrambling beneath it—he would toss them bones and scraps from his plate. The more the hostesses tried to lure this very eligible
widower, the more antisocial and outrageous he became. One trick with the dogs was particularly unpleasant. At the occasional parties he felt obliged to give in the mansion, J.I. would bounce a tennis ball up and down until the animals were leaping and slavering with excitement. Then he would suddenly fling the ball into a lighted fireplace. The dogs would leap into the fire after it and quickly retreat, singed and howling. While J.I.’s guests looked on appalled, he would roar with laughter. As a longtime observer once said of him, “From the day J.I.’s wife died, he loved only two things, the land and himself. The rest of the world could go scratch.”

  This is not an entirely accurate appraisal, though J.I. was nothing if not autocratic. He neither smoked nor drank and would not permit anyone in his house or in his presence to do so. In 1922 his younger son, Myford, married a handsome Australian-born girl named Thelma Romey, whom he had known at Stanford. After spending the first year of her marriage living in her father-in-law’s houses—in San Francisco and on the ranch—the bride quickly became accustomed to a rigid regimen governed by sounding gongs and ringing bells. To announce each meal and each day’s scheduled activity a bell was rung. “At least in San Francisco they rang musical chimes,” Thelma Irvine recalled many years later. “But at the ranch house a butler walked up and down the halls swinging a big cowbell. I remember my first morning at his house. A bell rang, and the housekeeper came into my bedroom to tell me that it was seven o’clock, time to get up. I was expected downstairs in the dining room for breakfast with my father-in-law, fully dressed, at eight on the dot. Anyone who was not there at eight would not be served. I simply said, ‘I won’t be down at eight. I’ll have my breakfast later, on a tray.’ You should have seen the expression on the face of that poor, terrified housekeeper! Actually, I got along well with him. We hit it off because I wouldn’t always take his orders. To me, he was a very lonely man, one of the loneliest men I’ve ever known. He was too suspicious of everybody around him to have any real friends. He was always sure that people were trying to cheat him, and probably many of them were. Of course, in the end I began coming down for breakfast with him—just because it upset the housekeeper so when I didn’t.”

  Though J.I. was abstemious in most respects, he was thoroughly addicted to bridge. Thelma Irvine had not been married long before she was ordered by her father-in-law to make up a fourth at the bridge table. “But, Father, I don’t play bridge,” she protested. “That’s all right, just fake it,” J.I. replied. Wisely, the new Mrs. Irvine refused to fake it, but she did find it prudent to learn the game. Later Charlie Cogan, who was in charge of sales for J.I.’s company, would say to Thelma Irvine, “You’re the best thing that’s happened to this family.” “Yes,” she replied tartly, “because he doesn’t drag you out of bed anymore to be a fourth for bridge. He drags me!”

  J.I. was also a man of deep private fears and anxieties, which he did his best to conceal and which only those closest to him sensed. When, during World War I, his older son, Jase, was sent overseas with the army, J.I. was certain that his heir apparent would be killed, and spent two years consumed with worry. It was during this period that he began rapidly losing his hair. Then, in 1919, his only daughter, Kathryn, married a man named Frank Lilliard and became pregnant with J.I.’s first grandchild. Though Kathryn begged her father to let her have her baby in a hospital, J.I. forbade it. He had been born on the ranch, he declared, and his first grandchild would be born on the ranch. Kathryn gave birth prematurely. The infant, a girl, survived, but Kathryn died. Thereafter J.I. was consumed with horrible guilt. He fell into a terrible depression, not marked by withdrawal but by bursts of violent anger. Because he was a tough and hardy man, he had expected his daughter to be as hardy as he, and she had betrayed him. Not long after his daughter’s death J.I. suddenly lost all his body hair, including his exuberant mustache. The cause was assumed to be the emotional shock of Kathryn’s death. From then on, wherever he went, J.I. covered his baldness with a hat, but the lack of facial hair and eyebrows gave his face an odd, waxen appearance. It pained him that his little granddaughter screamed in fright at her grandfather’s appearance when he tried to lift her onto his knee.

  But his land continued to be his primary concern. He would, he once said, do anything to protect his land—even kill for it. Still, despite the fact that, as one of his former employees once said of him, “His wages were low, his work hard, and he drained everything he could from you,” he succeeded in building up his ranch to the point at which, on his hundred thousand acres, he was sustaining one of the largest Valencia orange groves in the world. To do so he fought off squatters, poachers, and other encroachers with a fury that became famous in Orange County. He was less successful, however, in his battles with governmental bodies, which wanted to condemn pieces of his land for one public purpose or another, though he made it a policy, whenever these forced sales occurred, to use the proceeds to buy more land. When, for example, the United States government requisitioned some 2300 choice acres for El Toro Marine Air Base, J.I. took the government’s money and bought another hundred-thousand-acre ranch in Montana with it. With this “land for land” policy, he also was able to avoid any serious tax consequences.

  Although he had become one of the richest men in California, he remained miserly with his staff. He did, however, occasionally reward longtime and trusted employees with gifts of land. And he could also be extravagant. He spent thousands of dollars on fireworks for his annual Fourth of July cookout and barbecue, and he was known to make lavish gifts of clothes, jewelry, and travel to a long series of lady friends. In 1931, to everyone’s surprise, he announced his intention to remarry, choosing a bosomy San Francisco divorcée named Katherine Brown White. J.I. was then in his sixties and Mrs. White was some twenty years his junior. “Big Kate,” as she was called (though not to her face), was the daughter of a wealthy San Francisco businessman and the former wife of a prosperous lumberman. She was a large, garrulous, very outspoken woman fond of oversized hats. Even during their engagement J.I. continued to see other women. At one point his bride-to-be paid an unexpected call at the ranch while J.I. was entertaining another friend called Sally. J.I. turned to his daughter-in-law, Jase’s wife, for help. “Take Sally into town and keep her there,” he ordered. Town in those days meant the Santa Ana branch of Bullock’s, and the rejected Sally spent her time there well, running up over seven thousand dollars’ worth of purchases against J.I.’s charge account.

  Big Kate, according to one old friend, was “sort of a Diamond Lil kind of gal who liked to swish her sables, sweep into a room like a galleon under full sail, and make a big fuss.” She was also, it seemed, able to match J.I. pound for pound, blow for blow, and dog for dog—almost—and brought into the marriage her own swarm of twelve tiny Pekingese. Added to J.I.’s hounds, they made the mansion sound like a boarding kennel. Big Kate quickly put a stop to J.I.’s ball-throwing-into-the-fire sport and made it quite clear to her husband that she intended to have some rights of her own. “She led him around by the nose,” one family member recalls. “Nobody ever gave him hell before. I believe he liked it. Big Kate could be fun. I think J.I. admired her.”

  Though not as tall as her six-foot-two husband, Big Kate reminded others of an oversize Queen Victoria. For their honeymoon trip Big Kate and J.I. insisted that Mike and Thelma Irvine come along—not out of sentimental reasons, it turned out, but because the newlyweds wanted a bridge foursome. The four Irvines traveled by train—playing bridge all the way—north to Eugene, Oregon, and eastward to Cleveland. Somewhat to Big Kate’s surprise, the trip to Cleveland was based on sentiment. With his new bride J.I. was making a pilgrimage to visit his first wife’s relatives.

  Big Kate was able to tame her husband, but only up to a point. For years, out of penuriousness, J.I. had refused to have the mansion centrally heated, claiming that the winter chill was healthy and good for the circulation. Once, at a party at Jase’s wife’s house, he had fetched a pail of water and doused the fire in her firepl
ace. “But, Father, it’s cold!” the younger Mrs. Irvine had protested. “Why don’t you wear long johns like me?” he had roared in reply, and his daughter-in-law meekly passed out sweaters to her other guests. Big Kate, however, succeeded in getting her central heating. She also succeeded in breaking his no-drinking rule and began serving cocktails to her guests. (Big Kate also smoked, though J.I. never knew about it.) He had also refused to build a swimming pool for the mansion, maintaining that a pool was nothing but a waste of good irrigation water. Big Kate not only got her pool but a tennis court as well—though J.I. managed to have the last word on the pool. As soon as it was finished he had it stocked with trout; if one wanted to swim, one had to swim with the fish. Next, both Big Kate and Thelma Irvine campaigned for central air conditioning for the house. On that, however, the women were never able to prevail. “I lived without air conditioning,” J.I. would say. “So can you.”

  Still, as Thelma Irvine recalled many years later, life with Big Kate at the ranch was more fun—less lonely—than it had been.

  But four years after J.I.’s remarriage the Irvine household was plunged into grief once more when J.I.’s older son, Jase, died suddenly of tuberculosis at the age of forty-two. J.I. was devastated. He had clearly intended Jase to assume the stewardship of the vast and growing Irvine empire. His only remaining son, Myford, had shown no interest in nor aptitude for ranching. Living in the north, Mike and Thelma Irvine had used the ranch mostly for summer vacations and Christmas holidays. Mike Irvine was musical—he composed and played the piano and a number of other instruments—and had begged his father to let him major in music at Stanford. But his father had forbidden it, and Mike had settled for a job at the Irvine office in the Crocker Bank building in San Francisco, where he helped manage the family’s financial affairs. Now he was summoned permanently to the ranch to replace Jase, and Mike and Thelma Irvine gave up their big house in Hillsborough with its six servants, two gardeners, and private nine-hole golf course. “I also gave up all my San Francisco friends,” Thelma Irvine recalled later. “Now all our friends were my father-in-law’s friends.” The mansion became a household of widows and half orphans. Frank Lilliard had remarried and moved away. His motherless daughter, Katie, was growing up on the ranch with a governess. There was also Jase’s widow, and their little daughter. After Jase’s death J.I. became solitary and withdrawn and spent most of his days on horseback, riding around his ranch.