California Rich

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  And after so much violence over California’s land and water, it is perhaps not surprising that violence has become a habit, that it has followed a number of California fortunes down to the present day and generation. The children of the rich, of course, are often notoriously rebellious. Patricia Campbell Hearst, W.R.’s granddaughter, refused to be a debutante at Mrs. Tucker’s ball. Later she refused to continue to attend the Roman Catholic mass. Later she was expelled from the Santa Catalina School for Girls in Monterey, allegedly for possessing marijuana. Still later she went to live with a young man named Steven Weed, and from that ménage she was violently removed—either by kidnapping or through her own complicity (one will never know which)—by a bizarre group dedicated to violence, which called itself the Symbionese Liberation Army. There followed a long litany of disorders, including rape, gunslinging, armed robbery, murder, and a fiery, bloody shoot-out in Los Angeles.

  All the incidental ironies were noted in the press, which brought out the almost incestuous relationships existing within the perfumed circle of San Franciscans. Miss Hearst’s best friend had been Patricia Tobin, a great-granddaughter of Michael H. de Young, William Randolph Hearst’s archenemy. Patricia Tobin’s father, Michael Tobin, was president of the Hibernia Bank, which Miss Hearst helped rob. During the lengthy period when Patty Hearst was at large she apparently traveled extensively throughout the United States. And yet, with that curious homing instinct so peculiar to native Californians, she was within a few blocks of her parents’ home when she was finally apprehended. (Interestingly, when she surrendered to the F.B.I., one of the first things she asked for was a glass of water.) The jail in Pleasanton, in which Miss Hearst was ordered to spend part of her sentence, was not much more than a stone’s throw from the great villa where her Great-grandmother Hearst had once given extravagant entertainments.

  Most ironic of all, perhaps, was the fact that throughout her prolonged escapade Patty Hearst managed to create the kind of lurid front-page copy that her grandfather liked best. William Randolph Hearst might not have been flipping in his grave at all. He had never cared much about conventionality or even respectability. He would have loved the story.

  The Hearst affair turned California into an armed camp. Telephone numbers were quickly changed and taken out of the directory. Addresses were removed from the Social Register. Children were escorted to and from schools by bodyguards, and the two fashionable San Francisco girls’ schools, Sarah Dix Hamlin’s and Katherine Delmar Burke’s, stopped printing student lists. Plainclothesmen mingled with guests at debutante balls; debutantes’ names were for the first time withheld from the press, along with the names of opera box-holders; electronic surveillance devices were installed throughout the Peninsula, and an additional guard was stationed at the gate of the Burlingame Country Club. Everywhere the California rich gathered there was fear, and kidnap threats proliferated throughout the state. People in the East had trouble relating to and rationalizing these events. It seemed easier to conclude that everyone in California was crazy.

  The same conclusion was drawn at the time of the Charles Manson “family” murders at the home of actress Sharon Tate in Los Angeles when one of the victims turned out to be Abigail Folger, a beautiful Radcliffe-educated heiress to the Folger coffee fortune and a niece of Mrs. Robert Watt Miller, one of the grandest of San Francisco’s grandes dames. It seemed unbelievable that a proper San Francisco society girl had apparently become involved with the swinging drug-and-sex culture of Hollywood. For months after the Manson murders the rich of southern California went into, hiding.

  In the summer of 1976 the California rich were jolted again. A busload of Chowchilla schoolchildren were kidnapped and, with their bus driver, buried alive in a moving van that had been sunk in a dried mudhole. The newspapers were filled with harrowing accounts of how the driver was able to dig the children out and save them from suffocation. The motive behind the crime was unclear and seemed senseless; none of the parents of the schoolchildren was wealthy. But one of the alleged perpetrators of this nasty business, it turned out, was. He was twenty-four-year-old Frederick Newhall Woods III, a descendant of one of California’s oldest and proudest families. The Newhall ranch had once rivaled the Irvine ranch in size and productivity. One of young Woods’s relatives, Margaret Newhall, had married Atholl McBean, the largest shareholder in Standard Oil of California. The Newhalls had been prominent in affairs involving youth and education. It had been old George Newhall, according to one of many legends, who had first suggested to Leland Stanford that he build a university in memory of his dead son.

  Of course, by the late 1970s not all the descendants of California’s founding families were coming to bad or peculiar ends. A number of Floods, Mackays, and Crockers remain in California leading quiet, sedately moneyed lives. Down on the Peninsula, Michael de Young Tobin and his wife, the former Sally Fay, live not far from his Aunt Phyllis Tucker, the surviving de Young sister. As a hobby, Michael and Sally Tobin collect fine wines, which they store in a specially built heat-and-humidity-controlled cellar. As an oenophile, Sally Tobin says, “I think it’s almost insulting not to serve wine with meals. Even to people I didn’t really want to meet I’d serve wine—and not a California wine either. As for food, we simply won’t serve the ordinary. Steak is for butchers.” As a San Francisco society person, Mrs. Tobin is as discriminating and traditionalist as her husband’s aunt. “Frankly, I’m a snob,” she says. “So many unattractive people have come to California that I determined to see to it that my children mingle only with their own kind.” Mrs. Tobin also points out the subtle social distinction between Burlingame and the somewhat amorphous town of Hillsborough that Burlingame abuts. Of the two, Hillsborough is the better address, and the Tobins live in Hillsborough. “But,” says Mrs. Tobin, “we always say we live in Burlingame. If you hear people say they live in Hillsborough, you can be certain they are parvenus or climbers.”

  Many of the current generation of the California rich have remained active in the community. Gordon Getty, for example, a grandson of J. Paul Getty (once called “the richest man in the world” and a sometime Californian), is interested primarily in music and opera and in seemingly little else. Others remain active in the business community. Adolph Spreckels’ grandson, John Rosekrans, rather than relax with a large inherited fortune, developed a lively and successful business of his own, manufacturing and marketing water-sports equipment—a popular body-surfing board, a floating pool lounge chair, even a floating transistor radio. His brother, Adolph Spreckels Rosekrans, is a prominent San Francisco architect. Though John Rosekrans is now capable of living independently of his Spreckels money, he remains proud of his family’s history in California. It saddens him that when Kay Spreckels Gable’s son (by “bad uncle” Adolph Spreckels, Jr.) died in an automobile accident, leaving no offspring, there were no more Spreckelses in America to carry on the family name.

  Still others, after a taste of city life, have turned back to the land, where their forebears got their start. John D. Spreckels’ great-granddaughter Alexandra Kelham married a handsome Stanford-educated stockbroker, W. Robert Phillips, Jr. Several years ago, after a number of years in San Francisco, the Phillipses decided to move permanently to the country, to a spacious and sprawling Napa Valley ranch that had been Mrs. Phillips’ mother’s summer place. Here on some hundred and eighty rolling acres of the Valley’s flank, the Phillipses have been growing wine grapes. “The soil here,” Bob Phillips points out, “is very similar to that of the Burgundy and Champagne districts of France, and the Moselle and Rhine areas of Germany. So is the climate. The days are hot and dry and the nights are cool. Wine grapes don’t need much irrigation. Wine, they say, needs to ‘struggle’ to grow.”

  Wine has become the Napa Valley’s biggest business, and nearly seventy bonded wineries operate throughout the Valley’s twenty-five-mile length. Unlike the Gallo family’s operation in Modesto, where the emphasis is on mass production, the Napa Valley winegrowers—whose
collective output amounts to less than 5 percent of California’s annual production—stress quality. In 1976 two of the Valley’s smallest wineries—Château Montelena and Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars—produced wines that were judged better than some of the greatest wines from France’s Bordeaux and Burgundy vineyards in a European competition. To be sure, a number of the winegrowers in Napa are gentleman farmers, wealthy Californians who operate at a loss as a tax shelter. But Bob and Alexandra Phillips are determined to turn a profit with their grapes. Both work long hours in the vineyard during the harvest season. For her own table Alexandra Phillips maintains a vegetable garden and fruit trees. Though her house is large, she does her own cooking and housework. “After all, Claus Spreckels was a farmer,” she says. “He raised sugarcane and beets. He was my great-great-grandfather, though he only died in 1908, just twenty-six years before I was born. Time gets telescoped in California. Our history is really very short. The distant past was really only yesterday. Everything today has a direct bearing on and relationship to our past.”

  Alexandra Phillips can remember that in 1940, when she was a little girl, a mysterious tunnel was uncovered, leading from the basement of the James Flood mansion—by then the Pacific Union Club—into the basement of the house of her grandfather, Alexander Hamilton, on the other side of California Street. The tunnel was high enough for a man to stand in. She often wonders what the purpose of this tunnel was, what the “direct connection” between her family and the Floods might have been. At the time the tunnel was discovered, the Chronicle commented that the Floods and the Hamiltons “supposedly were no more than casual neighbors.”

  One thing that worries such winegrowers as the Phillipses is the fact that the suburban sprawl from San Francisco, Berkeley, and Oakland has been slowly but steadily encroaching on the Napa Valley, only about ninety minutes by freeway from the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. A number of well-heeled city folk have discovered the pretty little valley, with its climate much clearer and crisper than foggy San Francisco’s. They have begun buying and handsomely restoring the valley’s charming Victorian gingerbread houses. Napa, once a drowsy cattle-ranching town, has become chic. A former general store has become a gourmet food shop that sells, among other things, fresh beluga caviar. Trendy new boutiques and restaurants keep opening. So do new communities of mobile homes. As the land in the Napa Valley becomes more attractive to developers its price keeps going up, providing owners with increased temptation to sell. Today even a mediocre acre of grape land goes for as much as sixteen thousand dollars. The fate of the Napa Valley may one day be the same as that of the Irvine ranch: development, housing, shopping centers, office towers, a Sheraton hotel with a revolving cocktail lounge on the roof. Growers such as the Phillipses of course hope that this won’t happen and that the valley will be able to cling to some vestiges of its agricultural past.

  In southern California, Bernardo Yorba is the great-great-grandson of Don José Antonio Yorba, who came to California with Gaspar de Portolá and Father Junípero Serra in 1767 to expel the Jesuits. Today the early Spanish families, many of whom were originally Catalans, are intricately interrelated through marriages, and Bernardo Yorba’s cousins are Peraltas, Carillos, Sepulvedas, Serranos, and a great many other Yorbas, as his great-grandfather, also named Bernardo, had twenty-three children. Mr. Yorba himself has ten, fecundity being a Yorba family trait. Bernardo Yorba, however, is unique in the fact that his house in the Santa Ana Canyon stands on land that was once a part of the great Yorba rancho—some sixty-two thousand acres, mas o menos, which the original Yorba was granted by the King of Spain. Like other great ranchos, Don José Antonio Yorba’s Rancho Santiago de Santa Ana supported many thousands of head of cattle until the Great Drought, at which time much of the land was lost to gringo moneylenders. Later, reduced in size, the Yorba rancho was given over to groves of Valencia oranges. Bernardo Yorba still grows Valencia oranges on his canyonside estate, but, he says, “Only enough to squeeze into my vodka.” The Yorbas are also notable among the old Californianos in the fact that through the generations they managed to remain quite prosperous. Bernardo Yorba is a real estate developer and owns several large shopping centers in Orange County.

  Bernardo Yorba is a large, handsome olive-skinned man in his forties, and he is proud of his heritage, which he prefers to think of as Mexican. “My mother used to say, ‘We’re not Mexican, we’re Spanish,’” he says. “But I’d point out to her the wording of the original grant, which says it was granted to ‘José Antonio Yorba, a Mexican.’” Yorba works in an office in the Bank of America Building in Anaheim, an office filled with family photographs and other bits of memorabilia, including a collection of antique saddles, some of them trimmed with sterling silver. He is a proud member of the Congress of Charros, a patriotic-historic Mexican American group that puts on elaborate cowboy costumes and performs on such occasions as the Rose Bowl Parade. Yorba and his family, who all speak flawless Spanish—and even speak English with a trace of a Spanish accent—make frequent trips to Mexico, retracing the past, keeping track of their heritage. “I feel a great obligation to my heritage,” Bernardo Yorba says. “We must show the rest of the world that we continue to build on our heritage. We have to make a contribution. We have to participate.” In a drawer of a filing cabinet Mr. Yorba has collected ten fat folders of heritage—family trees, old documents, deeds, letters, chains of title—one folder for each of his children.

  Among the contributions Mr. Yorba makes to the Orange County community are the various school projects he has headed. He is also executive vice-president of the children’s hospital and is a director of the Angels Stadium Corporation. “We Yorbas are still doing our share, pulling our weight,” he says. “My wife and I want to set that kind of example for our children.”

  Though more than a hundred years have passed, Bernardo Yorba still speaks bitterly of the cupidity of the gringo moneylenders at the time of the drought, when much of the Yorba rancho became part of the Irvine ranch, and of the federal government’s concurrent insistence on challenging the Spanish land grants, which had been established a century earlier. Had it not been for these two forces, Mr. Yorba points out quite correctly, the history of California would have been quite different, and the state would consist of many Irvine ranches, at least one of which would belong to Bernardo Yorba. “Now everywhere you look in California is government land,” he says. “We need to produce off this land, but we can’t.”

  Yorba also blames the United States government for fostering the notion that Mexicans are a shiftless, corrupt, lazy, and ignorant people. “Mexicans are an ancient, sophisticated, and hardworking people, with deep roots in both the Spanish and the Indian cultures,” he says. “When Spain conquered Latin America, it didn’t try to drive the native Indians out the way the English colonists did in North America. Spain converted the Indians, yes, but conversion is an assimilationist move, which is the opposite of expulsion and killing and forcing the Indians onto reservations. If you ask me, the real destiny of California is contingent on our relations with Mexico. We’ve stomped all over Mexico for years, and the American oil companies have exploited the Mexicans from old Doheny on down. Now, of course, when Mexico has made some new oil discoveries, we suddenly want to get all friendly with Mexico. Talk about cynicism. Naturally the Mexicans want to get a good price for their oil, but we seem to expect them to give it to us. That idiot Schlesinger went down to Mexico, and when the Mexicans mentioned their price he called them bandits—banditos—and then couldn’t seem to understand why López Portillo felt insulted!”

  Like many other Californians, Bernardo Yorba freely admits that he has often employed Mexicans as laborers who are illegal aliens. “They’re hard workers, and they’re good workers because they love and respect the land. After all, this is land that my great-grandfather Bernardo first irrigated by diverting water from the Santa Ana River. The Mexicans are honest, they’re religious, they’re never drunk. The Mexican will always make arrangements
to have the major share of his money sent home to his family. Of course every now and then I’ll get a phone call from the Immigration Office and someone will say, ‘Sorry, Bernardo, but we’ve got your boys.’”

  “Finisterra”—land’s end, the edge of the world—is the name Linda Irvine Gaede and her husband gave to their spectacular home high on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean in a walled and heavily guarded enclave called Irvine Cove. (Like other wealthy families, the Irvines have had to cope with their share of kidnap threats.) From the many westward-facing terraces and patios of Finisterra one can watch seals and dolphins and whales go by, and swarms of pelicans fishing among the rocks. In the garage hangs one of a matching pair of monogrammed, custom-made, hand-tooled sterling silver saddles that J.I. had made for Big Kate and himself by Visalia, the great California saddlemaker. This was Big Kate’s saddle. The one belonging to J.I., with his initials carved in silver, has disappeared, along with a number of other treasures, including most of J.I.’s pen-and-ink drawings that were stored in the old Irvine mansion.

  In the hills behind the house, deer and possum still run, and a family of roadrunners has established itself in a wind-bent cypress tree. There is indeed a sense of the finite here, of coming to the end, at Irvine Cove. One could not really call the landscape beautiful—dramatic, yes, but the vistas are too stark and demanding for beauty. This of course is true of much of California, and newcomers are often disappointed to find that much of the state is not prettier than it is. The rocky hills are too tough, dry, and implacable; they fail to soothe the eye. The valleys are too broad and flat and mean. It is no wonder that so many Californians use the word “respect” when they speak of the land. Though the Irvine family is far richer than the Yorbas—and became so, one might well conclude, at the Yorbas’ expense years ago—Linda Irvine Gaede and Bernardo Yorba are good friends. Bernardo Yorba also expresses great “respect” for Linda’s cousin Joan, who, in her long battles with the family company, was defending her heritage too. Linda also respects Joan, even though the two women no longer speak. Linda does not agree with Joan’s motives at all, but she respects them. “She has her rights too,” Linda says.