The battle has cost her a lot more than imposing legal fees. It has caused a deep rift between Joan and her ever-loyal mother and the rest of the Irvine family. By 1979 it had cost her her fourth husband, Morton Smith; after sixteen years of marriage the Smiths were in the divorce courts. In the process she has become more antisocial than old J.I. ever was, and people who once considered themselves her friends complain that she never answers their letters, never returns their telephone calls—in fact, will not come to the telephone except to talk to one of her lawyers. When she goes out she is surrounded by a brace of armed bodyguards.
“The ranch seems to have taken over her life,” says her cousin, Linda Irvine Gaede, Myford Irvine’s daughter. “She’s become convinced that everyone is out to get her, that people are trying to do her in, that her whole family is trying to do her in. Why else the bodyguards? She thinks people are trying to kill her.” Linda Gaede accepts her father’s death as a suicide and attributes the dark talk of murder to Joan’s “paranoia.” Mrs. Gaede also believes that her grandfather died of natural causes on his fishing trip—“He’d had heart attacks before.” Linda Gaede adds, “Even though Joan is seven years older than I am, we used to be fairly close. But I haven’t spoken to her or set eyes on her in over a year, even though she lives right down the road. It is very difficult to remain close to someone in your family who keeps suing you.” From her spectacular house perched high on a bluff overlooking the Pacific, where pods of whale periodically pass by, and with a splendid view of Irvine Cove, where the Irvine children used to swim and surf, Linda Gaede can see the roof of the family beach house that all the Irvines put up several years ago, replacing an earlier structure. “The beach house was the last thing we did together as a family,” she says. “We all chipped in to build it—Joan, my cousin Katie, myself and my half brother Jimmy. But it’s hard to think of it as really a family place anymore.” Linda Gaede turns and points to a handsome jade horse that sits in a living room cabinet with other jade figures. “I managed to snap that horse away from Joan,” she says. “She collects jade too, but fortunately I heard that the horse was for sale while Joan was out of town. She’d have bought it instantly. But now it’s mine.”
What is it, in the end, that Joan Irvine wants, this good-looking, obsessive, extremely rich woman? Linda Gaede says: “She seems to just want more money, and to control the company. Also, it’s clear that she enjoys the fight for its own sake, just as our grandfather enjoyed a fight. She really should have been a man.” Others say she would be satisfied if she were made president of the company. But there is more to it than that, and Joan Irvine herself has said, “Why should I want more money? I already have more than I could possibly spend in a lifetime.” She has also often said that she sees the land as her “heritage” and that she sees herself as a “spiritual link” between the ranch’s pioneering past and its billowing future.
To Joan Irvine the ranch conveys a sense of place, of home, of family. It speaks of a young unlettered Irishman, the first James, down from the poverty of Belfast, who crossed the isthmus on a mule in search of Eldorado. After the disappointment of the gold fields he became a grocery clerk, and then turned to the land—three Mexican grants, all told, picked up as cheaply as the dirt itself—and with it the floods, the droughts, the chores, the plowing-under of the carcasses of thousands of dead sheep. There was love, and there were kisses behind the cellar door with a shepherd’s daughter, and more down by the bunkhouse where the ranch hands slept and got drunk on payday, then marriage to a pretty girl who came all the way from Cleveland, who gave him a strong son, the second James, whose feeling for the land was even more intense than his father’s, who would take up a gun to fight off the poachers and trespassers and thieves, even the big railroads that tried to muscle their way across the land—his land. Land that stretched from the mountains to the edge of the earth, the sea—as far as it would go; that was its particular significance.
And then, at last, the golden door that opened onto the polished parquet of the front parlor, the jade and teakwood furniture from Gump’s, the Spode and Baccarat and heavy tea services, the governesses for the children, the furs and the emerald earclips for Frances Anita’s birthday, and the clothes with Paris labels. And the violence, and the illnesses, and the deaths, and the betrayals, and little Joan riding in the saddle beside Grandpa, who had lost his favorite son and could not rid himself of thinking that he had helped kill his only daughter. From old J.I. she had grasped the fact that none of this had come easily. So many things had been tried, and had failed, on the land; promises had been broken and hopes had been dashed—first the cattle, wiped out in the Great Drought, then the prize Merinos, destroyed in another drought. Next came the cultivation of grapes, followed in 1881 by the terrible epidemic of grape phylloxera which in the next five years killed more than a million vines in Orange County. No sooner had the phylloxera been brought under control than the vineyard owners were dealt another blow: Prohibition. Next came citrus fruits, and now the orange groves were being plowed under for the next risky experiment—urban development, housing, shopping malls and greenbelts and office towers. On such attachments and associations and connotations there is no way to put a price, no way to subject any of it to logic. They had all fought and worked too hard and surrendered too much for what they had to give it up without a fight. To fight was just to give the land and its dead their due.
Her detractors have called Joan Irvine hard-boiled and bullheaded and arrogant. Jim Sleeper, a former Irvine official, refers to her sarcastically as “Saint Joan” and adds, “She’d pour water on a drowning man.” But she has also displayed traces of the kind of sentiment that her grandfather worked so hard to hide. Not long ago the Irvine Company proposed to drain the Peters Canyon Reservoir on the ranch. It was old and no longer used, and the lake bed could be put to more profitable developmental use. Understandably, the owners of homesites around the lake were not pleased with this proposal, and Joan took their side. She could remember, she said, the fun she and her grandfather had had fishing in the lake. She hoped the homeowners would be able to enjoy it with their grandchildren as well. The Peters Canyon Reservoir remained undisturbed. An Irvine Company official, struggling to compose his face to a rational expression when he speaks of Joan, says, “When she got her money we all thought she would pack up and go back to Virginia and raise horses and begin enjoying life.” To this Joan Irvine replies simply, “The land is still here, and so I’m still here.” She also likes to quote the comment of a real estate friend, Sandy Goodkin: “I would not say it is good land, but I happen to know that God dropped His option on the ranch only when Heaven came on the market.”
Of course, a sense of the importance of the continuity of generations is probably even stronger for a woman than for a man. In her long fight with the company Joan Irvine was also following something of a western tradition, that of women who picked up where their men left off. Such women as Mrs. Leland Stanford, out stumping the countryside for money for her university; Mrs. Huntington, daring to marry her own nephew; Flora Sharon, determined to marry a titled Englishman; the indomitable Alma Spreckels, set upon having her museum; blind Estelle Doheny, memorizing the names of all her orchids and holding on to the strings of her spendthrift husband’s fortune.
In the male world of California money, California women were showing the men that they could give them a run for it.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
End of the Battle
Alma Spreckels, who loved her children in an abstract way and enjoyed visiting with them when there was time between meetings and appointments for her various museum projects, made periodic efforts to be on good terms with them, particularly the two girls. But these were never really successful. For too many years the children had resented their mother’s outside-the-home preoccupations, which had left them in the care of governesses and nurses and other servants until they were old enough to fend for themselves. Little Alma’s youthful elopement and marriage to J
ohn N. Rosekrans had been interpreted as an act of filial defiance, and of course the marriage did not last long. Late in life Big Alma decided to divide her Washington Street house into three large apartments so that her daughters could live with her. At least that was what she had in mind. She gave the top-floor apartment, with its ceiling of Tiffany glass, to her daughter Dorothy, but Dorothy rarely came to San Francisco to use it. The second, or “parlor,” floor was for Mrs. Spreckels herself, and the ground floor was intended for Little Alma.
But Alma had no interest in living beneath her mother. She was involved in building her own huge modern house on Broadway, all decorated in black and white (the only colors that Little Alma—a tall, fair woman—ever wore), which had its own indoor swimming pool, among other amenities. So Big Alma offered the ground floor to the young man who had become her favorite grandson, Little Alma’s son, John Rosekrans, Jr. Rosekrans was equally fond of his grandmother, whom he called “Gangy,” and the span of another generation helped him appreciate her imperious manner and outspoken tongue that seemed only to startle strangers. Rosekrans’ first wedding, for example, had been a garden affair, and Mrs. Spreckels’ two daughters had been horrified to see their large mother take her seat in a gilt ballroom chair and drive its legs deep into the ground. It took two sturdy ushers to pull the chair out, while Mrs. Spreckels stood by muttering earthy expletives. Rosekrans had thought the whole episode quite funny. But about sharing the big house with his grandmother he had a few reservations. He was then in the process of getting a divorce, and he wondered how his grandmother might feel about the occasional lady friends who might visit him. “Don’t think a thing about it, pet,” she said. “Listen, you only live once, and when you’re dead you’re dead a long time. Your grandfather had a mistress, and when she died they turned her house into a mortuary. You do whatever you want.” And so Rosekrans took the big apartment, which had at least sixteen rooms, for which his grandmother charged him a token rent of a hundred dollars a month.
She didn’t snoop on him exactly, but she did like to pop in on him, usually unannounced. On emerging from her bath in the morning, at least one young woman who had spent the night was startled to see a tall, stout, elderly woman pottering about the apartment in bedroom slippers and a pink nightgown, helping John set up for a party he was planning that evening. “My God,” bellowed Mrs. Spreckels, “who the hell are you?” Such encounters became rather common.
Even after her son, the much-married Adolph, who had been such a trial to her in his lifetime, had died, she remained loyal to his memory. Kay Spreckels Gable, his sixth and last wife, was suing the estate and asking to be a trustee on behalf of her Spreckels children. “No!” cried Mrs. Spreckels. “She’s a bitch! Don’t give her anything!” And to make sure he knew how she felt on the matter, she began making daily telephone calls to the judge who was weighing the case. Her lawyer, Mr. Bradley, who was also an officer in the trust, begged her to stop making these telephone calls, which were only damaging the family’s position. She refused, snorting, “What does Bradley know?”
In later years she led a somewhat peripatetic existence, seeming to weary of the ongoing battle between her museum and the de Young Museum. She had never, of course, been really accepted by San Francisco society, which had become more or less dominated by the de Young sisters—an irony, considering the fact that their father had been one of the most dreaded and disliked men in town. At one point Mrs. Spreckels bought a house in Neuilly, outside Paris, and for a while had an idea of living permanently there. She also kept an apartment in New York at 1020 Fifth Avenue, where she sometimes spent her winters. But in the end she always came back to San Francisco, where, she liked to reminisce, she used to walk two miles to school to save the nickel streetcar fare.
Aside from her grandson, her favorite companion was probably Thomas Howe, the director of her museum, although she always was careful to address him formally as “Mr. Howe,” and he in turn always addressed her as “Mrs. Spreckels.” Her daughters clearly resented her relationship with him. (“She doesn’t call you ‘Mr. Howe’ behind your back,” one of her daughters snipped to him.) The two often traveled together to New York, to visit the art auction houses and the galleries—Findlay’s, Knoedler’s, and Duveen’s—along Fifty-seventh Street. They traveled to Washington to visit the National Gallery, and on one of these visits Mrs. Spreckels expressed a wish to see Colonial Williamsburg. She could be miserly, and though accustomed to being driven around San Francisco in a Rolls-Royce by a chauffeur, she decreed that the trip to Williamsburg be made in a rented drive-yourself car, which Mr. Howe would drive.
Arriving at Williamsburg, they checked in at the inn, and were asked how long they intended to stay. “Oh, about a week,” said Mrs. Spreckels. But by four o’clock that afternoon she had grown restless. “Mr. Howe, haven’t we pretty much seen everything?” she complained. “Let’s go back to New York.” So they checked out of the inn and flew back to New York from Richmond. In New York she was soon restless again and wanted to go home to San Francisco, though Howe had museum business to conduct in New York and needed to remain a few more days. “How much money do you think you’ll need?” she asked. Howe mentioned a modest figure—the year was 1940 and New York had not become an expensive place—and, somewhat grudgingly, Mrs. Spreckels peeled off a few hundred-dollar bills from the large roll she carried with her when she traveled. Three days later Howe was back in San Francisco, and he presented himself at Washington Street to deliver an accounting of his expenses. She received him, as usual, in her bedroom. Just back from a shopping trip, she tossed her large flowered hat onto one of the swan-headposts of her extraordinary bed (“A king made love in it, of course”) and nonchalantly wriggled out of her girdle and stockings. Howe explained that he had about three hundred dollars left over. “Do me a favor,” she said. “Put it into something for little Primrose.” Primrose was Howe’s young daughter. So she could be generous too—just as she could cause acute embarrassment to her friends. Once, at a dinner party where her guest of honor was Pierre Monteux, the celebrated conductor of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, Mrs. Spreckels boomed out, “You know, Mr. Monteux, Mr. Howe plays the piano!” Tommy Howe was then forced to go to the piano and deliver an awkward rendition of “Limehouse Blues.”
Still, Tommy Howe was devoted to her. “She was a kind of Fafnir character, out of Wagner,” he says. “People didn’t always agree with her, and people didn’t always like her. Her two daughters hated her heartily. But better than anybody I’ve ever known, she had the ability to sense the fundamental qualities in people, and cut through sham and pretense.” Howe never made any pretense, either, of the low esteem in which he held the daughters. “Neither of them ever did anything for their mother’s museum. We were raising money for some awards once, and I went to Dorothy and asked her for a contribution of two hundred dollars. She said she could only afford a hundred dollars. Practically in the next breath she was talking about an expensive necklace she wanted to buy. It was Dorothy too who once sent a hasty note to her mother from Palm Beach, enclosing a photograph of herself sitting next to the Duke of Windsor at a dinner party. “Look who I’m sitting with!” wrote the granddaughter of a man who had once won a large part of the kingdom of Hawaii in a poker game. Her mother wrote back, saying, “I give up. Who is it?”
Tommy Howe remained loyal to Mrs. Spreckels even after Little Adolph died and Mrs. Spreckels began to be more and more of a recluse—even after the time had come when Howe would arrive at Mrs. Spreckels’ house to deliver copies of the latest museum catalogues and she would no longer want to see him. Her grandson, John, had been remarried—to a woman, fortunately, whom Mrs. Spreckels liked—and had moved into a house of his own, and John and Dodie Rosekrans were among the very few people whom Gangy asked to see. In 1964 she fell and injured her back. Later that year she had another fall and broke her hip. She recovered from that, but six months later she came down with pneumonia, and died at the age of eighty-three.
Immediately her two daughters fell to wrangling over the funeral services. Dorothy wanted the private family services at her house, and Alma wanted them at hers. Finally, when it was pointed out by the directors of N. Grey & Company, San Francisco’s fashionable undertaking establishment, that the platinum-plated casket that Dorothy had insisted upon would not fit through the doors, Dorothy relented, and the services were held at Little Alma’s huge black-and-white modern house (six years in the building; Alma had not wanted her mother to see it until every last black-and-white detail was finished). The service was small, just for family and close friends, and Mrs. Spreckels reposed in the huge casket wearing a black dress, her famous pair of sunburst diamond clips, and some other stones. Tommy Howe read “When Earth’s Last Picture Is Painted,” and Dorothy Spreckels Munn whispered to him, “Doesn’t she look sweet? Of course I’ll take the jewels off before they close the coffin.”
The public funeral the next day was something else again. It was held in the huge rotunda of the Palace of the Legion of Honor, in the center of which Mrs. Spreckels lay in state. It started at ten in the morning, and long before that hour the rotunda and the rooms and grounds beyond had filled with more than ten thousand people—friends, enemies, public officials, the press and television, and merely curious San Franciscans who wanted a glimpse of the legendary old lady who had lived alone in the block-long “Sugar Palace” in Pacific Heights. Just before the services were about to start a tour bus pulled up in front of the museum and disgorged a full load of out-of-town art lovers, who were quite unaware of what was going on. As the tourists entered the museum, noticing that the center of attention was obviously the platinum-plated casket, the tour guide announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, this is a wax effigy of the museum’s founder, the late Mrs. Alma de Bretteville Spreckels.” Immediately a museum guard stepped over to him and hissed, “That is not an effigy. That is Alma de Bretteville Spreckels.” It was a moment Alma Spreckels might have enjoyed.
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