California Rich

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Some San Francisco people wonder whether the Cotillion will survive Phyllis Tucker when she is gathered to her ancestors—at least in its present by-invitation-only form. But it survives—in testimony, perhaps, to her unshakable belief in traditional modes and manners, as well as to the power of pure snobbishness and the siren lure of landscapes that only the Chosen, only the Elect, may set foot upon.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  “Valley People”

  One reason why the San Francisco Debutante Ball did not flourish for long was that, in order to attract support, the ball included debutantes from the Central Valley or, more accurately, the two broad valleys formed by the San Joaquin and Sacramento rivers—a vast area of flatland stretching for some four hundred miles between Redding and Bakersfield. The ball honored young women from such towns as Stockton, Modesto, Lodi, and Sacramento, even from as far away as Fresno. Perhaps because of its peninsular physical shape and similarly narrow and insulated frame of mind, San Francisco and San Franciscans had long been accustomed to regarding themselves as a special breed apart from all others, superior in fashion, architecture, taste, and cultivation. This had nothing to do with money, because when you stopped to think about it (which San Franciscans didn’t do very often), there was a great deal of money in the Valley, in oil and agriculture. Most of what San Francisco ate was raised in the Valley, and perhaps that had something to do with it. San Franciscans had come to regard Valley people as purveyors of victuals for the table, rather like caterers, and therefore part of the servant class. San Francisco’s feelings of superiority over Los Angeles were as nothing compared with their feelings toward residents of Stockton, Modesto, Lodi, and Sacramento.

  The wealthy Valley families were well aware of this attitude, resented it deeply, and, as a result, developed classic symptoms of inferiority about their addresses. A Modesto woman, for example, traveling in the East, would seldom identify herself as being from Modesto. She would say, “I live about eighty miles inland from San Francisco.” A Sacramentan might admit that Sacramento was his home—it was, after all, the capital of the state—but he would usually add, “But we often drive to San Francisco for dinner.” A Valley woman might buy her clothes where her citified San Francisco sisters did, at Magnin’s, Ransohoff’s, and Saks, but when she attempted to join the Francisca Club, San Francisco’s elite, all-woman answer to New York’s Colony Club, she met resistance. A wealthy Valley rancher might own as many Brooks Brothers and Roos-Atkins suits as his San Francisco brother, but it was difficult for him to join the Pacific Union Club. Businessmen from New York, Chicago, Washington, and Atlanta had no difficulty joining San Francisco’s exclusive, quasi-artistic Bohemian Club. But it was a different story for a banker from Stockton. One Modesto man was turned down by the Bohemian Club so often that he made it something of a crusade. When, after some twenty years of rejection, he received word that his membership had finally been approved, he was so excited that he suffered a cardiac arrest and died with the letter in his hand.

  A wealthy Valley mother might send her daughter to San Francisco’s fashionable Miss Hamlin’s School for girls (where, as a boarder, she would immediately be marked as an outsider in a student body composed primarily of city day students) or her son to the Menlo School for boys, but that did not mean that the youngsters would ever be invited to Mrs. Tucker’s Cotillion or, for that matter, to any other fashionable San Francisco parties. This was true simply because people from the Valley were, as San Francisco sneeringly referred to them, “Valley people,” carrying the stigma of being farmers, hayseeds, country bumpkins, hicks.

  There were, to be sure, certain disadvantages to living in the Valley. During a strike by the Teamsters Union the wife of a wealthy dairy farmer might find herself helping her husband lift twenty-gallon milk cans onto a flatbed truck to get the milk to the marketplace, and the husband, driving the truck, usually placed a loaded pistol on the seat beside him, the Teamsters’ reputation being what it was. At the height of the harvest season the peach grower’s wife could often be found in the packing shed sorting and crating peaches. No matter how rich the farm, there were always certain duties that befell the farmer and the farmer’s wife. Some of the wealthiest Valley ranchers worked in their shirt sleeves, Levi’s, and muddy boots and carried their lunches in paper bags, even those who regularly changed into black tie for dinner.

  The Valley landscape was not particularly inspiring; without hills, there were no real views or vistas, only a certain sameness in every direction. Perhaps because there was really nothing to look out on, the houses of the Valley rich (along with their gardens and swimming pools) began to encase themselves behind high walls of stucco or brick or redwood “privacy fences.” This custom tended to give the residential streets of Valley towns a certain monotonous appearance, a squared-off, boxed-up look that offered the passerby no clue to the luxuries that might exist inside the boxes. Finally, there was the Valley climate—the damp, chilly winters (never really chilly enough to be cold), and the dense, almost impenetrable fogs that rose from the tule marshes along the riverbanks. In summer, there was the searing heat—temperatures as high as 120 degrees for days on end. And despite sophisticated efforts to control the considerable insect population of this agricultural region, even a short drive down a Valley highway could result in a windshield covered with the corpses of flying bugs. In San Francisco it was said you could spot a Valley person’s car by the insect-deflector mounted on its hood.

  Still, Valley people did their best not to be recognized as “Valley.” In the days before air conditioning was standard equipment in California cars it was not uncommon to see a Valley woman, driving to San Francisco for a day at Gump’s and Magnin’s, wearing nothing but a slip and bra. Only when she had left the heat of the Valley and had descended the last foothill of the Diablo Range into the misty coolness of the Bay Area would she pull off the road in some inconspicuous place and with difficulty put on her little black suit with the mink collar, her hat, gloves, girdle, and stockings, in order not to be outdone by the San Francisco ladies having Monday lunch at the St. Francis—ladies, to be sure, most of whom she would never meet.

  The Valley was the butt of all San Francisco’s little jokes. Herb Caen, the popular columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, would lead off a column with a snide aside: “Lodi’s leading playboy (and that’s funny right there) …” And the disparagement of Valley towns often reached a national level, as when a newsmagazine wrote (in a review of a novel by Leonard Gardner called Fat City): “The place is Stockton, California, a city filled with a litter of lost people, most of whom pile on urine-smelling buses each morning and head for the onion, peach, or walnut fields for a killing day on skinny wages.” Such towns as Visalia, Yuba City, and Colusa fared no better in the national press. In the early 1970s the lyric of a popular song moaned, “Oh, Lord, stuck in Lodi again!” And so it has gone. Each time a new slur against the Valley towns has come to the surface, the Valley people, and the editorial writers of the Valley press, have reacted with outrage and indignation, but to no avail. The poor image of the Valley had jelled.

  Even Mrs. Ronald Reagan, during her tenure as First Lady of California, spoke scornfully of her forced residence in Sacramento, not only the capital but also the Valley’s largest city. “Thank heavens we can escape to Beverly Hills on the weekends,” she told a journalist, adding that she had to go to Beverly Hills at least once a week to have her hair done. “No one in Sacramento can do hair,” she sweepingly asserted. Like most people from San Francisco and Los Angeles, Nancy Reagan had never spent much time in the Valley and had never set foot in Sacramento until her husband was elected governor. When she did, she was horrified by what she found.

  The California governor’s mansion at the time was a huge turreted affair of Victorian gingerbread built in 1878, painted a glittering wedding-cake white. An exuberant house from that exuberant period of California history, it was reminiscent of James C. Flood’s wedding-cake mansion in Menlo Park,
and previous governors and their ladies, including the Earl Warrens, had found it charming. It recalled the old days of the spring floods, built as it was high above the level of the street and approached by a wide flight of snow-white steps. But to Mrs. Reagan it was immediately unacceptable. “There were seven fireplaces, none of which could be lit,” she said. “The house was on a corner facing two gas stations and a motel, and it backed up on the American Legion Hall, where I swear there were vile orgies every night. The house was condemned fifteen years ago. I said to Ronnie, ‘I can’t let my children live there.’” When she saw the mansion Mrs. Reagan refused to occupy it, and the governor indulged “Mommy,” as he calls her, and settled on a state-rented house in the suburbs of the city. (It was during the Reagan administration that construction of a new, modern California governor’s mansion was begun, which Governor Jerry Brown refused to occupy because it was “too luxurious.”)

  In Sacramento, Mrs. Reagan also said that she was “too busy” to get to know any of her Valley neighbors. She made one trip to the Sacramento branch of Magnin’s and found its merchandise inferior to that in the stores of Beverly Hills and San Francisco, where she preferred to shop. “Here everything is scaled down for these Valley farm women,” she said.

  These, needless to say, counted as nothing less than fighting words to the men and women of the Central Valley, who, among other things, had been Ronald Reagan’s staunchest Republican supporters. Valley people, after years of put-downs by citizens of the coastal cities, wear their psychological scars as chips on their shoulders and have become vociferously, pugnaciously defensive about the Valley. In their counterattacks Valley people usually use money as their chief weapon of defense, pointing out how much sheer wealth has been amassed there, thus giving San Franciscans further ammunition with which to claim that Valley people are coarse and nouveau.

  It is certainly true that a great deal of money has been made in the Valley. There is the case, for example, of the late Mrs. Tillie Lewis of nearby Stockton, typical of the new, post-robber-baron fortunes that have been made in California. Tillie was a Jewish girl from Brooklyn, New York, born in 1901, the daughter of Jacob and Rose Ehrlich. Tillie started out in the wholesale grocery business in Brooklyn and went into the canning business in 1935. With her second husband, Meyer Lewis, she founded and developed Flotill Products, Inc., a cannery, in Stockton, that took advantage of the area’s expanding reclamation—through the construction of levees—of rich Sacramento Delta land, which was given over to tomatoes. Her enormous fortune built up when Flotill’s canneries developed a way to take sugar out of canned tomatoes and juices. In 1951 the Associated Press newspaperwomen named Tillie Lewis—or “Tillie Flotill,” as she was now known locally—as Businesswoman of the Year. Naturally she was taken into the Stockton Golf and Country Club and the Tennis and Racquet Club of Palm Springs—but not into the Francisca Club of San Francisco or the Burlingame Country Club. She might be a savvy city lady from the East, but she was still a Valley farm woman.

  At the same time, there are a number of Valley families that have been established longer than families in San Francisco and Los Angeles and that could count themselves among the oldest of California’s old guard. In Bakersfield, for example, the landholdings of the Tevis family were almost as large as those of Henry Miller, and the Tevises and Millers represent a longstanding money feud. In the 1930s, while the heirs of Henry Miller were battling with one another over their shares of his estate, the Tevises found themselves land-poor. In order to raise capital the Tevis family interests formed the Kern County Land Company, and shares were sold to the public, thereby departing from Tevis family control. Not long afterward a bonanza in oil was discovered beneath Kern County Land Company acreage. Kern County Land Company shareholders found themselves rich overnight, and at least one man, Mr. C. Ray Robinson, the lawyer who had handled the Land Company’s affairs, made himself a million dollars in legal fees alone, not counting what the jump in the value of his stock had netted him.

  The Tevises moaned and gnashed their teeth, but, alas, there was really nothing they could do. Though still very rich, they saw a whole additional fortune slip through their fingers. At one point the Tevis mansion in Bakersfield had had its own private golf course, and the Tevises had entertained foreign royalty in their home. In 1870, Lloyd Tevis had built one of the first great castles on Nob Hill in San Francisco, where his library contained (or so he liked to boast) the largest collection of books in the West. Later the Bakersfield house became the clubhouse for the Stockdale Country Club, and still later the country club was purchased by George Nickel, a San Franciscan and Henry Miller heir. None of the Miller-Lux heirs today feels the slightest guilt about gloating over the fact that the Millers still outweigh the Tevises in terms of financial leverage.

  Farther north, in Fresno, the county seat of what is called “the richest agricultural county in the United States,” the Giffen family has been hugely wealthy for several generations. Today Russell Giffen, from an office furnished with museum-quality eighteenth-century American and English antiques, directs a ranching operation with acreage in the hundreds of thousands—so much land that he is not quite sure how much he owns—raising cotton, barley, wheat, safflower, alfalfa seed, melons, tomatoes, and a good deal more. Still, for all their money, old-family background, and elegant lifestyle, the Giffens have never been invited into the Social Register, because they are Fresno.

  In San Francisco such Italian American families as the Baldocchis, Aliotos, Cellas, Gianninis, Ghirardellis, and Petris have all made their way into the Register. But eighty miles away, in Modesto, the Gallos, the largest wine producers in the world, have not, despite the fact that the homes of the brothers Ernest and Julio Gallo are local showplaces. (Of course it was not always thus for the Gallos. At the height of the Depression the Gallo brothers’ father, convinced that he was a ruined man, led his Italian-born wife by the hand out into the vineyard and put a bullet through her head before putting a second bullet through his own.)

  There is something about the Valley people that seems to set them apart from city folk—a certain manner and a certain cast of mind. Being farmers—or, in the current vernacular, being in the “agribusiness”—the Valley men are tough, pessimistic, politically conservative, fiercely independent, contentious, and hot-tempered. If there is one thing a Valley rancher resents it is “folks from outside trying to tell us what to do.” The folks from outside are usually from the federal government, and at the heart of much of the continuous grumbling is the Central Valley irrigation project, and what kind of water will go where from which dam, and the fact that it is a U.S. Department of the Interior project—representing outsiders from Washington.

  Though Stewart Udall long ago departed from his post as Secretary of the Interior, mention of his name still raises the hackles of Valley farmers. After all, Udall was an easterner (from way back east in Arizona, where water from the Colorado River has long provided a bone of contention for the two states that share its banks), and he came out representing Washington and tried to change things around. Former Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz is held in even lower esteem. (A Valley rancher was found floating face down in his swimming pool—supposedly for putting in a good word for Wirtz.) It was Wirtz who did away with the bracero program, which ranchers—now that it is no more—tend to speak of today as one of the great humanitarian achievements of the twentieth century. The braceros were Mexicans brought into the Valley during peak picking seasons to perform the “stoop labor” of gathering low-growing fruits and vegetables. “Why, the braceros were the greatest boost to the Mexican economy there ever was!” one rancher insisted not long ago. “The Mexicans who came up here loved the work, and they were wonderful workers. A good picker could make anywhere from sixty-five hundred dollars to ten thousand dollars in a season! But then the Government came out here and said we should put heaters in the bunkhouses—heaters! A Mexican’s not used to a heater! Doesn’t want one, much less know how to use it!
They said to us, ‘Why aren’t you feeding them meat? Why aren’t you feeding them eggs?’ My Lord, don’t those damn fools in Washington know that a Mexican eats tortillas and beans?”

  Valley ranchers admit that they may have used the wrong public relations tactic when Secretary Wirtz came out to California in the 1960s to look over the conditions under which the Mexican laborers worked and lived. For one thing, one rancher had the misfortune to say that Mexicans were ideally suited for stoop labor because they were “short and built close to the ground”—and to be widely quoted across the country. For another, the ranchers, hoping to woo Mr. Wirtz to their point of view, put on a big party for him, which may have been a grave mistake. Wirtz was a teetotaler—or at least he frostily refused the many stiff drinks that were urged upon him—while Valley ranchers pride themselves on their capacity for alcohol. Wirtz also made a point of not eating a single bite of the elaborate barbecue that was spread before him, leaving the implication, very strongly, that he would prefer to see the Mexican workers offered similar fare. He went back to Washington, where he promptly canceled the bracero program.

  There are other complaints related to agriculture. As one Valley rancher puts it, “The national farm program has been conducted as a relief program for the South. Farm legislation on a national scale has been controlled by the South and the Midwest. California keeps getting the short end of the stick. For years the chairmen of both the House and Senate agricultural committees were Southerners, and now we’ve got a goddamned Southern farmer in the White House. Meanwhile, we’re caught here in a cost-price squeeze. Our taxes go up, but our customers have concentrated their buying power. There used to be, for example, hundreds of canneries for the cling-peach people to go to. Now there are nineteen or twenty. Those of us who used to sell direct to markets—well, there used to be thousands of little ones to shop from. Now there are just a few big superchains. So it’s harder for the farmer to fight for his price.”