California Rich

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Santa Barbara was first colonized by the rich in the days when golf and tennis and polo were becoming popular rich men’s pastimes, the era that saw the dawn of the American country club. The exclusive Valley Club, which became the “old-guard club,” was the first one built, and later came the Birnam Wood Club, for a newer guard. A third country club, the Montecito—bought recently by a Japanese consortium—came to stand lowest in the club pecking order, and is considered “commercial.” The Little Town Club, founded in 1914, became Santa Barbara’s leading social club for women and established its quaint rules, such as “Six to a Susan.” (For lunch the club has tables for six, with a lazy Susan in the center of each table; it is against the rules to sample a tidbit from anyone else’s lazy Susan.) But it is typical of Santa Barbara’s residential-resort beginnings that, socially, the real center of things should long have been a hotel, the elegant Santa Barbara Biltmore. It has long attracted such regular international visitors as Baron Philippe de Rothschild, who winters there and swims daily in the Olympic-size pool of the adjacent Coral Casino (a members-only club for Santa Barbara residents, free for Biltmore guests).

  When an architect named George Washington Smith came to Santa Barbara in the 1920s he quickly put his stamp on the place, doing for Santa Barbara what Stanford White did for New York and Long Island and what Addison Mizner did for Palm Beach. He designed mansions in the preferred Spanish Colonial style, with vaulted ceilings and the accompanying bell towers, balconies, and courtyards. His flights of Mediterranean fancy were extreme, and he thought nothing of going to Spain and Italy to bring back boatloads of tiles, lanterns, shutters, and grilles to adorn his creations. It is said that when Harry K. Thaw, who murdered Stanford White, was released from prison, he visited Santa Barbara, and, viewing a George Washington Smith house, commented, “I think I killed the wrong architect.” Still, because there are only twenty-nine Smith houses in Santa Barbara, to own one has long been a—if not the—major status symbol. And when, as rarely happens, a Smith house goes on the market, it is certain to bring at least a hundred thousand dollars more than a house of comparable size by another architect.

  One woman who still lives in the Smith-designed mansion she had built for herself in 1925 after the earthquake is Mrs. Angelica Schuyler Bryce. The eighty-seven-year-old Mrs. Bryce, who has always been known by her childhood name, “Girlie,” is one of the grandes dames who for years have ruled the social seas of Santa Barbara. She actually worked with George Washington Smith on her house, traveling with him and helping him collect the antique hammered-iron hardware that was meticulously copied in Europe and brought to her California estate. On her fifty-five landscaped acres, called Florestal, Girlie Bryce maintains what amounts to a private zoo, including forty-five peacocks and a sixty-year-old Galápagos tortoise named Gappy, who is fed a diet of watermelon and fresh fruits imported from Hawaii. Gappy reciprocates by allowing Mrs. Bryce’s thirty-eight grand-and great-grandchildren to take turns riding on his back when they come for visits. For all the splendor of her surroundings, Girlie Bryce complains, “Santa Barbara has gotten so big. If it gets any bigger it’s going to be a horrible place.”

  And Santa Barbara has gotten big. Before World War II it was a sleepy town of some 35,000 souls. By 1950 its population had jumped to 45,000, and today it is a city of over 200,000. After the war came Vandenberg Air Force Base, bringing in a sizable military contingent. Then came the University of California’s Santa Barbara campus, and Robert Hutchins with his Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, both of which not only added people but also contributed what Santa Barbara considers an intellectual, think-tank atmosphere to the place which it had never had before. Dr. Hutchins’ pronouncements from his lush hillside villa (“Mankind’s intellectual power must be developed”) are given much weight. Then came General Motors, bringing with it some hundred new families. The General Motors people tended to stick to themselves, which was fine with Santa Barbarans, who adopted the attitude, “If you don’t want us, we don’t want you.”

  As Santa Barbara has grown, its more firmly established citizens have spent some time trying to define what, exactly, Santa Barbara really is. It is no longer a resort, it is not like any other city in California, or typical of anything, but what is it? Santa Barbara refuses to be influenced by either Los Angeles or San Francisco—many Santa Barbarans insist they never have need to visit either city—or the East. It is a city that has set about determinedly to develop its own style, architectural as well as philosophical, but the latter is a little difficult to describe. It is a style, furthermore, whose practitioners resent and resist criticism from outside Santa Barbara.

  In 1976, for example, Santa Barbara was up in arms; there was only one topic of conversation on everyone’s lips. (Normally there are two topics of conversation on everyone’s lips: spiraling real estate taxes and the more comforting phenomenon of spiraling real estate values.) The uproar was over a magazine article. In its June issue Town & Country had carried an article called “The Santa Barbara Style,” consisting of a short text and many pages of color photographs of wealthy Santa Barbarans enjoying their favorite pastime, Santa Barbara. It showed Santa Barbarans in polo outfits and riding habits; in their terraced, Italianate formal gardens, around their colonnaded pool houses and pools, in their opulent living rooms and bedrooms with trompe l’oeil walls painted to reproduce likenesses of the views from the Gritti Palace Hotel in Venice. It showed Santa Barbara suffused in sunlight, with views of blue sea and skies and purplish mountains, and Santa Barbarans dressed in pastels of pink and blue and lavender, in Pucci pants and Gucci shoes. “Disgusting!” “Perfectly ghastly!” “Dreadful!” were some of the local opinions expressed about the article. But considering the obvious beauty of the setting which the article conveyed, along with the golden healthiness of the residents, it was hard to figure out what the fuss was all about.

  Gradually it emerged. While everyone agreed that the article had been correct in pointing out Santa Barbara’s fondness for foreign cars—Mercedeses and BMWs in particular—what everyone objected to was the magazine’s choice of people photographed to illustrate the piece. What, for example, did Suzy Parker (formerly a New York model, now married to actor Bradford Dillman and living in Santa Barbara) have to do with Santa Barbara? How did Clifton Fadiman (born in New York, and Jewish) or Barnaby Conrad (a San Francisco transplant) fit into the Santa Barbara scene? Certainly Hair producer Michael Butler, sort of a millionaire hippie from Chicago who was once arrested for raising marijuana in his garden, was far from the typical Santa Barbaran; he had once entertained Mick Jagger. Most offensive of all, it turned out, was the woman whom the magazine had chosen to picture on its cover, Mrs. Manuel Rojas, wearing chandelier emerald earrings to match her eyes. What did she have to do with the Santa Barbara style, everyone wanted to know. Chandelier emerald earrings were most definitely not the Santa Barbara style. The Rojases, furthermore, were considered nouveaux riches (Perta Oil Marketing, Inc.) and originally were from, of all places, Beverly Hills. They had come to Santa Barbara as recently as 1974. A more untypical Santa Barbaran couple could not have been found. It was inconceivable to Santa Barbara that Mrs. Rojas might have been chosen primarily for her beautiful face. As far as Santa Barbara was concerned, a far more acceptable cover girl would have been octogenarian Girlie Bryce.

  Santa Barbara is a community in which literally hours can be spent discussing who is “typical Santa Barbara” and who is not. The typical Santa Barbaran, it is agreed, is “conservative.” If for “conservative” some people read “stuffy and smug,” that is perfectly all right with Santa Barbara. Santa Barbarans feel that they have elevated smugness to an art form. The typical Santa Barbaran goes in for espadrilles and tennis shoes more than for emeralds, which Mrs. Rojas was clearly shown wearing in broad daylight, against even the most liberal rules of jewel wearing.

  The typical Santa Barbaran distrusts outsiders and newcomers and dislikes change. When the local Baskin-Robbi
ns ice cream shop discontinued a flavor called pralines ’n’ cream, the citizenry, who had grown fond of the flavor, picketed the establishment until pralines ’n’ cream was restored to the inventory. Santa Barbara women like to boast that theirs was the last community in America to endorse the pants suit, and even then the fashion did not gain many local supporters. The typical Santa Barbara woman does not support the ERA, admires Ronald Reagan and Anita Bryant, and thinks that if Richard Nixon had just burned the incriminating tapes, the whole business of Watergate could have been avoided.

  The typical Santa Barbaran is extremely town-proud and civic-minded. It has been said of Santa Barbara that it is a city of meetings and that nothing can be done until a meeting has been called to discuss all the ramifications of whatever it is. At the same time, Santa Barbara is distrustful of city government, and government in general, and believes that any decisions affecting the city should be made by the citizens themselves, who are believed to know what is good for them and what isn’t. When a stretch of freeway was planned between San Francisco and the Mexican border, passing through Santa Barbara, Santa Barbarans decided that they did not want traffic streaming through their community at seventy miles an hour. They went to battle with the California State Department of Transportation and—though it took years—they won. Now Santa Barbara has the only segment of the freeway’s six-hundred-mile length on which motorists are kept at a respectful speed by being forced to stop for a series of traffic lights. When offshore oil spills began dirtying their beaches Santa Barbarans met and formed an organization called GOO (for Get Oil Out). They took on some of the country’s largest oil companies to get them to clean up their operations and won again.

  Typifying Santa Barbara’s attitude toward city government was Miss Pearl Chase, who once said, “People won’t be inspired to help a community unless they are part of it. Government officials are really temporary. They come and go, and this constant turnover means that citizen organizations have far greater power.” For years Miss Chase was perhaps the most typical Santa Barbaran there ever was, along with Girlie Bryce. She was immensely rich. Her family owned the Hope ranch, which several years ago was sold off and subdivided and developed—as the Irvine ranch has been attempting to do—to become one of the town’s most elegant and expensive suburbs. In fact, it was Pearl Chase’s brother, Harold Chase, who developed the Hope ranch property, along with Girlie Bryce’s late husband, Peter Cooper Bryce. For all her wealth, Pearl Chase lived rather modestly in a large Victorian house full of sagging furniture, faded curtains, old scrapbooks of family memorabilia, and genteelly dusty clutter. If she owned any emeralds, she was never seen wearing them.

  Change of course has come to Santa Barbara, as it has everywhere else where the rich have tried to isolate themselves behind walls and gates and rolling lawns and gardens. And some developments have thoroughly startled the otherwise orderly and conventionally well-behaved residents. In the 1970s, for example, a rich and social wedding united two old-line Santa Barbara families. Then, shortly after the wedding, the young bridegroom announced his intention of having a sex-change operation. For years the sedate Little Town Club never served alcoholic beverages. Again in the 1970s, a proposal was made that the club offer wine with lunch. This created quite a fuss. In a surprising development, it turned out that all the older women members were in favor of the wine, while all the younger members were traditionalists and did not want wine. Eventually the older group won out, and wine was introduced. Soon afterward came hard liquor. “Now,” complains an older member, “it’s so noisy at lunchtime you can’t hear yourself think.”

  “Oh, how Santa Barbara has changed!” complains one matron, a Santa Barbara resident for more than fifty years. “It used to be a simple, charming place. All the houses had blue shutters. We would eat at El Paseo, standing in line with trays for the most delicious food. The annual Fiesta was beautiful. Now it’s horrible. People used to have lovely parties. Now we hardly go anywhere. There was wonderful dancing at the Biltmore. Now it’s part of a big chain.”

  The change, the dowager feels, began during the Second World War. “There began to be a strong fascist feeling here,” she says. “There were a few men who were out-and-out Nazis. I remember one man who called ‘Heil Hitler!’ across a dinner table, and another who said, ‘Let us hope and pray that Germany wins the war.’ One of those men is still around. During the war it all became terribly snobbish and anti-Semitic.”

  But unlike Los Angeles ninety miles to the south, Santa Barbara isn’t going to get much bigger—at least for the time being. In recent years southern California has been undergoing periodic acute water shortages, and now each Santa Barbara household is water-rationed according to a complicated formula based on past consumption, number of persons in the household, and so on. If a Santa Barbara homeowner exceeds his water quota, he is charged a penalty, even though there seems to be plenty of water with which to sprinkle golfing greens and fill thousands of backyard swimming pools. It was the water shortage that was given as the reason for declaring a moratorium on new building in Santa Barbara some time back. But another reason for the building stoppage, Santa Barbarans admit, was to keep out more new people. The moratorium has had another pleasant effect as well. With no more new houses allowed to be built, the value of existing properties has climbed enormously.

  Best of all, despite its growth from a small town to a medium-size city, Santa Barbara has retained a sense of place, a singular identity, a sense that Santa Barbara could happen only here, along this particular curve of Pacific Ocean, against these particular mountains. Los Angeles, in its hectic growth, never really acquired a sense of place, of specificity, or a distinguishing character all its own. Except on rare days when the surrounding hills are visible, Los Angeles has lost its topography, even its geography; driving through Los Angeles, one lacks a sense of getting anywhere. And if Los Angeles seems never to have paused long enough to acquire a distinctive city personality of its own, San Francisco—at least in the view of most Santa Barbarans—seems to be losing the personality it once had, as the Victorian bow-front houses that clustered along the hills give way to high-rise towers; as a Standard station has appeared right on the top of Nob Hill, across the street from the Pacific Union Club, formerly the James Flood mansion, one of the few great houses that survived the great fire; as more and more downtown streets have given way to porno shops and adult movie houses; and as the large homosexual community has become a political force.

  And yet, whatever else it is or isn’t, Santa Barbara is still a place, its own place, where, as one woman describes it, “genteel people live—people who don’t need to be justified by anything.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Finisterra

  In California the approach of winter is not distinct. There is no true autumn, no real foliage change. Leaves fall, and all at once the elms and sycamores are bare. But the palm trees remain the same, and the rhododendron and the boxwood, and except for a damp chill in the air it is possible to believe that nothing really has occurred. Winter begins with rain. Suddenly the long dry summer is drenched with a great downpour. Streets run with water, rivers rise in their banks, and dry creek beds become slow-moving, muddy ponds with eucalyptus and poplar trunks standing in the middle of them. Swimming pools fill up to their gutters and turn murky green with algae. In the Valley the ditches and canals from the great dams in the north run swiftly. After this first rain every day seems to have more rain or heavy fog or cold wind, and for a period the land of eternal sunshine seems lost in a damp, swirling cloud.

  A true Californian respects the rain and this curious half winter. For Californians never lose their awe of water, the water that made the desert bloom with peaches, apricots, artichokes, lettuce, and grapes. This great source of life returns to California each year, sometimes as early as September, sometimes as late as November. The rain will mean snowfall in the Sierras, and the amount of snowfall will affect the amount of runoff in the spring melt. At the
same time, Californians are fatalistic about the rain, because it can offer not only a blessing but a bane as well. Too early a rain can damage fruit and vegetable crops ready for harvest. In the south too much rain can spur a lush growth of tall trees and shrubbery in the foothills, which, during the dry summer months, will become as parched as tinder and dangerously flammable. The slightest spark will set it off. The arsonist and incendiary are tempted. It is the easiest trick in the world to set a mountain range on fire: just leave a cigarette smoldering between the covers of a folded matchbook and walk rather rapidly away.

  In southern California the rain washes the air of smog, but it also brings down mud slides and causes hillside houses to lose their footing and swimming pools to float up out of the ground, like blue boats, from the hydrostatic pressure in the earth. The rain brings down pollutants in the air—most the result of the internal-combustion engine—in the form of a slippery, oily slick, more treacherous than ice, and there are accidents and tie-ups on the freeways. Secretaries and executives alike phone in to say they will be late for work and meetings because of the traffic jams caused by the rain. Californians have grown cynical about the rain, because the water of life is also the water of death. It was bad weather, along with the effects of the Great Depression, along with the effects of Prohibition, that caused the father of Julio and Ernest Gallo to conclude that all was lost and end his life.

  Land and water, life and death—these paired themes recur in any account of the California rich. Violence is never far away when life and water are at stake. Land and life, animal or vegetable, are insupportable without water. Our bodies are composed largely of water, and yet water plays tricks on us: we cannot live three days without it, nor can we survive much longer than three minutes underneath it. No wonder our feelings toward water are irrational, almost paranoid. Brigham Young, arriving in a waterless valley in Utah that supported, according to the legend, only a single scrubby pine tree, is said to have declared, “This is the place.” It must have looked to him like nowhere at all. But Young was tired and ill, too weary to cross the next flank of mountains, and it was as far as he wanted to go. He may well have meant to say, “All right, this place is as good a place as any.” To the California pioneers, who went farther, the inhospitable landscape of their destination also must have looked like nowhere. But like Brigham Young, they decided that Nowhere could be a place.