California Rich

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  The moment the services were over, Dorothy Munn cornered Tommy Howe to say, “Quick, come with me to the mausoleum. We’ve got to get the jewels off before they close the casket!” Howe accompanied her to the mausoleum, where the clips, rings, and necklaces were quickly removed from the earthly remains of Dorothy’s mother. Then the casket was closed and sealed.

  It had long been the hope of San Franciscans that the resources, revenues, and collections of the two battling museums could somehow be combined into one museum of art. But even though Mrs. Spreckels was gone, the de Young sisters continued vigorously to oppose a merger. More people would have to die before this could be accomplished, and the final opponent, Helen de Young Cameron, did not die until the early 1970s. With that the two museums finally agreed to join hands and marry. But even then the de Youngs seemed to have come out on top. When the new, combined museum, consolidated under a single director, Ian McKibbin White, became a reality at last in 1972, the de Youngs managed to get top billing on the letterhead, which read:

  THE FINE ARTS

  MUSEUMS OF

  SAN FRANCISCO

  M. H. de Young

  Memorial

  Museum

  California

  Palace of the

  Legion of Honor

  Of course one of the peculiar things about the de Young sisters, when all four were alive, was that they all actually seemed to like one another. That was unusual in San Francisco. More common were the Spreckels sisters, who, with their mother gone, now had only each other to quarrel with. Among other money-related issues was the question of which woman would control 2080 Washington Street—the enormous wedding-cake house in which even the servants’ rooms had wall-to-wall carpeting, the house with its $30,000 French commodes, its $25,000 motor-operated movable glass swimming-pool enclosure and built-in radiant-heating system, and everything else, almost literally, that money could buy.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Overnight Tradition

  Although Alma de Bretteville Spreckels had never appeared to care whether or not she was accepted as a leader in San Francisco’s fledgling society, it was clear that the de Young sisters did. In their social ambitions the sisters were inspired and directed by their mother, a gentle creature of cultivated speech and manners who, throughout her lifetime, did as much as she could to offset her husband’s unsavory reputation. She also had to counter the galling fact that for many years the children of the city’s “better” families were not permitted to enter the de Young house at 1919 California Street—the house that had mysteriously made its way out of the hands of the Crockers. Mrs. de Young tutored her daughters in the social graces—“Never point, except at French pastry”—and, though none of the girls was exactly a beauty, she had tutored them assiduously in acquiring that elusive element so important to an earlier generation—charm.

  They all had it. They could enter rooms with pleasant expressions on their faces and move with light, quick steps to where their hostess stood to tell her how beautiful she looked, how lovely the flowers were, how pretty the house was. Though not notably intellectual or quotably witty, the sisters were all skillful at making light, engaging small talk about this or that, and when it came to party gossip they were attentive listeners. They had soft, light voices, they were punctual, they remembered names. On the street or lunching at the St. Francis, they were invariably gloved and often hatted, masters of the expensively understated elegance for which San Francisco women were becoming famous. There was nothing about these poised and gracious ladies to suggest that their father had been little better than a blackmailer. And the fact that he was Jewish was elaborately overlooked.

  The de Young sisters were also certainly collectively—and perhaps even individually—far richer than their father had ever been. This was a state of affairs that was not uncommon in the second generation of California fortunes, and it had to do with the state’s astonishing population growth between, during, and after two world wars and the resulting steep escalation of property values. For example, Helen de Young’s father had given her “some sand dunes” on the southwest side of town. She had placed little value on this real estate and had hardly given it any thought at all until after World War II, when the sand dunes were being snapped up by developers for middle-income housing at many thousands of dollars an acre. The de Young sisters had also made impeccable social marriages—Yvonne to Charles Theriot, Constance to Joseph Tobin, Helen to George Cameron, and Phyllis to Nion Tucker, whose occupation was “sportsman.” Unlike the Spreckels daughters, the de Young girls seemed capable of staying married.

  Meanwhile, Mrs. Eleanor Martin, San Francisco’s first real social leader, had died in 1932 at the age of one hundred and one, and her mentor, Ned Greenway, had long passed from the San Francisco social scene to the great ballroom in the sky, and the rituals of his Cotillions had been abandoned. San Francisco languished through the 1930s with no real polarizing force, but the de Young sisters were waiting in the wings. In 1941, while America nervously watched the war in Europe, Phyllis de Young Tucker decided that San Francisco society needed a revitalizing shot in the arm. With Stuart Nixon, an assistant manager of the Palace Hotel, and Mildred Brown Robbins, society editor of the Chronicle (which, being a de Young paper, was guaranteed to give any de Young project fullest support), Phyllis Tucker announced plans to revive the San Francisco Cotillion along the original Greenway lines. The revival was a huge success. The guests paraded about the Palace ballroom performing the intricate quadrille figures, and the climax of the evening was reached when the season’s crop of debutantes, in long white dresses and long white gloves, were presented, one by one, on the ballroom stage. Soon afterward, of course, came Pearl Harbor, and a moratorium was declared on coming-out parties, but as soon as the war was over, Phyllis Tucker revived the Cotillion again—again successfully. It was designed to be an annual affair, second only in social importance to the September opening of the San Francisco opera.

  Debutante parties were enormously popular in the late 1940s and 1950s throughout the country, and, looking back, it is a little hard to see why. Though based on the ancient custom of presenting the eligible virgins to the males of the tribe—a custom that goes back to the Stone Age and even before—they had more or less lost their point by the mid-twentieth century. The eligible virgins all knew the male members of the tribe anyway, sometimes only too well—and how many of them were actually virgins was always open to question. As parties, most debutante balls were not all that much fun. It was hard to get the boys to dance with the girls—the boys preferred gathering in little knots to tell jokes or shoot craps—and for that reason a debutante usually invited more than one male escort, often as many as four or five. Still, despite the preponderance of males over females, there could always be found at least one debutante sobbing in the powder room because no one would dance with her. Most debutante parties were not given for the purpose of having fun; their intent was to confer social status, not only on the debutante herself but on her parents.

  The trouble was that the status conferred was in most cases illusory. Though the balls were touted as “exclusive,” they weren’t really exclusive in the sense that certain people were carefully excluded from them. Most American debutante parties of the era were produced for charities, for which they raised a considerable sum of money, and this meant that any parent capable of raising the required price could have his or her daughter made a debutante—provided of course that she was not black or Jewish or, in Boston, Irish Catholic—regardless of lineage, family background, social graces, or other credentials of respectability. All sorts of “outside” people had to be included too. The perfume manufacturer who provided the party favors had to be given a table at the ball for his executives and their wives, along with the distillers who had donated the liquor, the florist who had provided the decorations, and the hairdressers who had coiffed the young ladies. In other words, most American debutante affairs did not represent a gathering of real “society”
at all. Most were commercial enterprises, fund-raisers, with more than a touch of Madison Avenue (including advertising sold for the programs), where places on the debutante list were bought and sold.

  But some were not. In more firmly established eastern cities the coming-out ritual was quite different. Many eastern cities had been colonized by the British, who had brought with them the traditional British class system. And though America had no peerage as such, certain eastern families had joined to compose a strictly defined aristocracy, based not only on wealth but also on length of local residence and similarity of education, interests, manners, and tastes. In cities such as Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Charleston, there were families who could trace their descent for more than two hundred years in one place and who placed great emphasis on and took great pride in their ancestry, birthplace, and breeding, and who set themselves rigidly apart from outsiders and newcomers.

  Just as it was in England, a family could live for fifty years in Philadelphia and still remain “a stranger to these parts,” incapable of penetrating the tight stronghold of old-guard Philadelphia society. The Philadelphia Assembly had been started in 1748, and for a young woman to be presented at the Assembly she virtually had to be born to it. In Charleston the St. Cecilia Ball, which dated from 1762, was equally exclusive, and so was Baltimore’s Cotillion. In Charleston certain young women could attend the St. Cecilia as “out-of-town guests,” provided they lived more than a hundred miles from Charleston, but first their credentials had to be carefully checked by the ball committee. If a girl had lived in Charleston twelve months or longer, she was considered a “resident,” and if she was not a member of St. Cecilia—and most newcomers weren’t—there was no possible way she could attend the ball. Some new families moved out of Charleston, at least temporarily, after eleven months, just so their daughters could qualify as out-of-towners. In both Charleston and Philadelphia a divorce was considered a blot on the escutcheon, and there were cases in which certain Philadelphia parents were not even permitted to attend their daughters’ presentations at the Assembly because they had been divorced. Obviously charity played no part in these venerable institutions. They were strictly private parties, their costs divided among the participating families of society.

  Obviously, too, San Francisco could claim no families who had been prominent for more than two or three generations. The young Jimmy Floods could not conceal the fact that Mr. Flood’s grandfather had been a bartender and his grandmother a chambermaid. In Phyllis Tucker’s case, the rough edges of the de Young family had not been smoothed out until her own generation; and the Spreckels sisters had to accept somehow the truth that their father had not even graduated from high school. Phyllis Tucker was aware of all this. One could not deny the raw state of San Francisco’s upper crust, but one could simply ignore it. Though San Francisco might he short of families whose ancestors had signed the Declaration of Independence or crossed on the Mayflower, one could still adopt the pattern set by such ancient eastern cities as Philadelphia and Charleston and thus achieve an effect of overnight tradition and instant old money. This was what Phyllis Tucker chose to do with her San Francisco Cotillion. It would be unquestionably a private affair, with no charity as beneficiary. Costs would be borne by the families of the debutantes invited to the party, and the invitation list would be strictly controlled by Mrs. Tucker and her committee. No debutante could buy her way in; she had to be chosen for the honor.

  This policy insured the Cotillion’s success—in the 1940s and 1950s at least. Parents of would-be debutantes who did not meet Mrs. Tucker’s standards vainly knocked on her door, wrote her letters, and wooed her with lunches at the St. Francis and invitations to little dinners. Families who had friends who were also friends of Mrs. Tucker’s tried to have the mutual friends intercede on their behalf, but nothing worked. Mrs. Tucker was always pleasant, always polite, but always firm. “I just don’t think your daughter would be happy as a debutante,” she would say with a sympathetic little smile, and that was that.

  Needless to say, the San Francisco families that had been excluded from the little chosen circle of Floods, Folgers, Tobins, de Youngs, Crockers, Meins, Nickels, Millers, and Tevises were not happy with this state of affairs. After World War II many new-rich families had come to San Francisco and its suburbs, and these families also wanted debutante status for their daughters. Rather quickly a number of rival debutante balls were organized. Across the Bay, in Oakland, the Winter Ball, benefiting a hospital, was established. To the south of the city the Peninsula Ball came into existence, and in the new-money suburbs of Marin County, to the north, the Marin Ball presented debutantes for seven hundred dollars a head. Finally, a Cotillion rival was set up in the city itself, the San Francisco Debutante Ball, which benefited the Presbyterian Hospital and where it cost a girl a thousand dollars to be presented. But none of these had the cachet of Mrs. Tucker’s Cotillion and, in fact, merely served to emphasize the superiority of the affair. When a girl was presented at anything other than the Cotillion, everyone in town knew she was settling for second best.

  Through it all Phyllis de Young Tucker began, almost literally, to levitate to the top of San Francisco society. Though some hated to admit it, she had become unquestionably the leader. There was something almost other-worldly about her easy, smiling mastery of every social situation, as the city bowed and scraped and curtsied to “Aunt Phyllis,” and some spoke, a little bitterly, about her “elevation to sainthood.” She was like royalty. Out of her creation, the Cotillion, satellite groups sprang up. There was the Spinsters, for example, a postdebutante club consisting mostly of Cotillion alumnae, which put on an annual ball, and the Spinsters’ male counterpart, the Bachelors, which put on a ball of its own “to repay the Spinsters and certain debutantes to whom the Bachelors are indebted,” and soon the Bachelors had a rival group of their own which called itself the Downtown Operators’ Association. All these organizations owed their existence to the spiritual leadership of Phyllis Tucker. What no one realized of course was that Phyllis Tucker was making San Francisco dance to her tune just as effectively as her father had made it dance to his.

  In her wake—but not very far behind—swam her sisters, but, alas, they did not have Phyllis’ staying power. Mrs. Theriot went down on the Andrea Doria. Then Constance Tobin died, and then Helen Cameron, whose great estate in Burlingame, Rosecourt, was thereupon broken up. But Mrs. Tucker survived—survived, miraculously, the great revolution of the 1960s and 1970s that was to spell the doom of debutante parties across the country: the revolt of youth.

  Suddenly it seemed that though it was still all right to be rich, it was no longer acceptable to show it. Though parents were still eager to continue the coming-out tradition, their assertive and outspoken children were not. Coming-out parties were condemned as sexist, irrelevant, wasteful, undemocratic, shamefully unimportant compared with the plight of Chicano workers in the grape fields, the poisoning of the environment by the internal-combustion engine, Jane Fonda, nuclear waste, and Cambodia. Boys replaced dinner jackets and sports cars with patched jeans, guitars, and motorcycles. Girls preferred to outfit themselves from thrift shops, and it was difficult to get a girl to put on so much as a dress, much less a long white ball gown and opera-length gloves. At parties, champagne was replaced by marijuana. The rites of passage from youth to adulthood seemed to have changed abruptly, and unkempt hair, clothes, music, and manners among the young were not only all at once permissible but the order of the day.

  Parents of every economic stratum were dismayed by what their children had become and struggled to grasp the new ideology. The middle classes blamed everything from television to Vietnam and Kent State. The rich blamed, among other things, the schools and the servant problem; they saw a generation that had been brought up, unlike their own, without the reins and guidance and strict discipline of. German governesses and English nannies. Clearly, coming-out parties were in deep trouble all across the country. All at once there were s
o few young women willing to make their debuts at the Marin Ball that it was canceled, never to be revived. The San Francisco Debutante Ball tried adding a rock group to enliven the traditional waltz and fox trot strains of such bandleaders as Meyer Davis, Lester Lanin, and Peter Duchin. Then it tried changing its name—dropping the word “Debutante”—and referring to the girls as “honored guests.” But by 1972 only seven honored guests could be rounded up, by sheer coercion, for the occasion; and that ball too disappeared without a trace from the San Francisco social scene the following year.

  Still, however uncertainly, the San Francisco Cotillion and Mrs. Tucker remained, undaunted through an entirely new social climate, hanging on by what seemed the slimmest thread. And Mrs. Tucker may have been right in sticking to her guns, because in the late 1970s the pendulum started to swing back again. It began to seem as if the youthful rites of passage had not changed permanently after all, and in cities across the country the ranks of debutantes, which had diminished to a trickle, began to swell again. Each year from 1977 on, a few more young women appeared not only willing but eager to come out, to cross the stage with white-gloved hands tucked in their fathers’ arms and deep-curtsy to their peers. After all, every species has a mating dance, the rituals of which survive for centuries. In the jungles of New Guinea, fathers of girls who have reached puberty toss coconuts into the sea to announce the fact. The wealthier or more influential the father, the more coconuts he throws out to sea. In America the coconuts are dollars.