Was It Ever What It Used to Be?
Of course there are very few women in Society today who lead the sort of life that was led, just a couple of dozen years ago, by Mrs. Edward T. Stotesbury. She received, as wedding presents from her husband, the senior Morgan partner in Philadelphia, a simple $100,000 diamond-and-sapphire necklace and $4,000,000 in cash to make up for it. She enjoyed such luxuries as a flotilla of maids who were in charge of nothing but her clothes. Every afternoon Mrs. Stotesbury would summon her wardrobe staff—who arrived carrying massive costume books and catalogues of jewelry—to help her decide what to wear for dinner. Even such a seemingly small task as deciding which diamond bracelet to wear, can, when one has sixty-five, take time.
Mrs. Stotesbury’s way of life, people in Society often point out, is one that has gone the way of all 1040 forms. But it was fairly uncommon even in her own day. Her parties were criticized as being a touch garish. A generation or so earlier, the famous Bradley-Martin ball—where the hostess appeared in a twenty-foot-long train, a crown, and $100,000 worth of diamonds on her stomacher alone and Mrs. Astor managed to support $200,000 worth on her head—drew so much criticism in the international press that the Bradley-Martins exiled themselves to England forever. Mrs. Stotesbury’s guests did not overlook the fact that her husband had been nothing but a six-dollar-a-week clerk before becoming one of the country’s richest men. And, even at the peak of her career as America’s most spectacular hostess, Mrs. Stotesbury was not considered a bona fide member of Society. Even so she has become, today, a more or less permanent constellation in the social firmament. Some people insist that it takes at least three generations for a family, starting with nothing but money, to elevate itself to the highest Society. (Given another three generations’ time, it is also said, the same family will fritter its way back to the ash heap.) Mrs. Stotesbury proves that an individual can be elected to Society posthumously.
Mrs. Stotesbury’s children—one is the former wife of the late General Douglas MacArthur, and the other a former husband of Doris Duke—lead lives of comparative quiet and obscurity, as do other members of other families whose wealth once glittered in the public eye. The descendants of Belmohts and Goulds and Goelets, of Biddies and Bakers and John Wanamakers have, as real estate taxes have gone up, moved from brownstone and marble palaces on Fifth Avenue and Rittenhouse Square, into apartments; here they achieve a certain anonymity. The offspring of Astors, Gardners, Vanderbilts, Fishes, Harrimans and Iselins can be found in made-over gardeners’ cottages on country estates. A number of Society people are, very quietly, doing something that formerly would have been thought very odd indeed: they live in places like Newport and Tuxedo Park, year round. (“The season here,” says one Tuxedo butler discreetly, “is now from January first to December thirty-first.”)
But are our great Society families languishing for lack of funds? Let us not weep too bitterly for them. Taxes may have scaled down some families’ living habits. Quite a number of Society families are, comparatively speaking, poor. But a number of others are just as rich as their grandfathers were, or even richer. The late Vincent Astor, for instance, who inherited $87,200,000 in 1912, increased his fortune—right through the Great Depression—to the point where it amounted to $200,000,000 by the time he died in early 1959.
Money may be spent in less conspicuous ways than in making a woman topheavy with precious stones, but it is still spent. Mrs. J. Denniston Lyon of New York, for instance, who only recently was gathered to her ancestors, spent it on her tiny Pekingese, Peaches. Peaches had been trained to relieve himself in Mrs. Lyon’s garden in her country place on the North Shore of Long Island. In winter, lest Peaches be confused or disturbed by the move back to Fifth Avenue, Mrs. Lyon directed her butler to make weekly trips out to Long Island. There he spaded up a square of Long Island lawn and returned with it to New York for Peaches. Peaches indeed was so particular that though he loved to eat caramel candies, he would only eat the imported Italian ones sold at the expensive food shop Maison Glass. Mrs. Lyon, among other expenses, maintained a yacht anchored off Palm Beach. A year-round staff of five was required for its maintenance. When its owner died she had not sailed the boat, or set foot upon it, for fully fifteen years. Her house in Aiken, South Carolina, stood similarly unvisited, though the house was ritually opened at the beginning, and closed at the end, of each Aiken “season.” “And it was not,” says one member of the family, “an easy house to open and close. The silver and the paintings had to be taken out of the vault and then put back again—that sort of thing.”
Nearby, a neighbor of Mrs. Lyon’s, Mrs. Dorothy Killiam, had an extraordinary swimming pool constructed. Of average width, it was of surprising length—appearing like a long, blue canal through the garden. This was because, though its owner liked to swim, she disliked having to turn around. Taking her architect to Palm Beach one winter, she waded into the sea and began to swim along the shore. When she tired, she emerged, and said, “Measure it off. That’s how long I want my swimming pool to be.” For parties, a hundred and fifty guests for a sit-down dinner was not uncommon, and in summer—since North Shore weather could not be relied upon—she had tables set for a hundred and fifty in the house as well as out of doors. At the last minute, then, she could decide where to sit her party. To place the centerpiece over the largest table, her houseboy used to swing from a large, thick rope, slung from an overhanging eave above her terrace. Cleaning Mrs. Killiam’s massive plunge was a chore tantamount to mowing John Nicholas Brown’s lawn at Newport. Because the lawn slopes at a forty-five-degree angle into the water, gardeners and their mowers must be lashed with heavy ropes from the crest of the rise lest men and machines be plunged into Narragansett Bay.
The servant problem is, of course, a problem. It is certainly no longer possible to acquire a “good, honest, healthy and well-trained chambermaid” for twenty dollars a month, as a 1914 advertisement in the New York Times put it. It sometimes seems as though there are no well-trained chambermaids at any price. “It isn’t the upper class that’s dying out, it’s the servant class,” says a New York lady, anxiously eyeing her courtly, but creaky, majordomo. Mrs. George Roberts of Philadelphia has said, with a good deal of accuracy, “The only good servant is a person who thinks it’s nice to be a servant. Nowadays people simply don’t think that being a servant is a nice way to earn a living.” As a result of this, there are Society people who still live in houses with rooms for twenty servants and yet have to pick up and deliver their maids each day. Many live in houses with private switchboards, and answer their own telephones. Some who maintain boxes at the Opera must hire sitters in order to attend.
On the rolling acres of Penllyn, Pennsylvania, there are a number of imposing houses which, as a matter of family pride, the present generation of Philadelphia’s distinguished Ingersoll family is determined to keep up. The late Charles E. Ingersoll managed to run his house with three men for outside work, a chauffeur, a cook, two maids, a butler, and a pageboy called, in the English manner, the buttons. (Once, in the 1920’s, after a slight misadventure in the stock market, Mr. Ingersoll advised his family that some stringent belt-tightening was in order, and in a drastic economy measure he dismissed the buttons. But it so distressed him to see his family thus deprived that he sent them all off to White Sulphur Springs for an extended rest and holiday while he hired another buttons.) In the old days, the Ingersoll staff at Penllyn was such that the meandering gravel drives of the estate could be freshly raked after each vehicle passed. But on the Ingersoll place the other day, Mr. Ingersoll’s son John and his wife sat down for cocktails feeling tuckered. The two (she is a Cadwalader) had spent the afternoon replacing a hundred feet of iron fencing. Far from entering a decline, Real Society is often working very hard.
And yet here again we are faced with a contradiction. For all the talk of the servant problem, there are a number of Society families who seem not to have been affected by it at all. On the North Shore of Long Island, throughout the Great Servant Shortage of the Second World War, one hostess managed to muddle through with fourteen maids who did nothing but arrange flowers. (How do fourteen young women busy themselves with nothing but flowers? Among other things, they implanted large Styro-Foam balls with broom straws and, at the end of each straw, secured a rose; the huge floral globes were used as table centerpieces. In the conservatory, an organ-pipe cactus grew nearly two stories high. Each day, the girls decorated it by placing a camellia bloom on each needle. Striking color effects were sometimes worked out with, say, red blossoms on the base of the cactus, fading to pink, and to white at the top. “That sort of thing,” commented an awed guest when he saw one of the floral fountains, “ought to be government-subsidized.”)
At “Viking’s Cove,” her summer place at Oyster Bay, as well as at her houses in New York and Palm Beach, Mrs. George F. Baker appears to have successfully overcome the servant problem. A year or so ago her English butler of many years’ service expressed a desire to return to England for a visit. Mrs. Baker agreed to let him go and, moreover, made him a gift of his passage on a boat. But he had no sooner sailed out of New York Harbor than Mrs. Baker remembered a party she was having for Senator Barry Goldwater two weeks later. She cabled the butler on shipboard, and when he reached Southampton, he took one brief look at his native land—his first in nearly twenty years—and boarded a boat to take him home again. “I could never have given the party without him,” said Mrs. Baker.
Even in Spartan, unshowy old Boston, the servant problem seems to be more a matter of how you look at it. Here, when a young debutante asked a friend if she would enjoy helping her pick out a gown for a coming party, the friend said that she would be delighted. The friend was startled, however, when the debutante sat her down on a sofa and spread open a Sears, Roebuck catalogue between them. When the friend murmured something about the uncertainty of getting a proper fit, the young lady said, “Oh, I can always have Anna take it in.” Anna, needless to say, was her governess.
Anthropologists will journey to remote corners of the earth to find those rare spots where a species, or form of life, is still in the process of evolution. Any aboriginal society is a rewarding study, best observed before the missionaries have arrived and instructed all the natives to wear Mother Hubbards, and so it is with the American concept of a social elite. There are only a few places left where the Real Society notion can still be glimpsed evolving, where one can see how it started, and why. In such Eastern cities as Philadelphia, Charleston, and Boston, the evolutionary process was completed in the early 1900’s, when Society began to congeal into a more or less consistent pattern, and to begin its continuous and stately celebration of genealogy. San Francisco, on the other hand, a newer city, was just beginning to emerge from the primordial ooze when it suffered its historic fire and had to start all over again. Since then, it has had to work extra hard and fast to establish for itself an Old Guard. If Society ever was what it used to be, San Francisco should be a good place to observe it.
“But how can there be a Real Society out there?” perplexed Bostonians are likely to ask. “After all, nobody’s been there for longer than three generations—and who were they originally? Gold prospectors and prostitutes, from what I’m told—the worst sort of ragtag and bobtail.” But Thomas Carr Howe, director of San Francisco’s California Palace of the Legion of Honor, has said, “The fascinating thing about Society here is that the leaders of the city today are the grandchildren of the people who made the place.” It has been a long time since any Easterner could make such a statement. “I gather they just copy what we do here,” says a Philadelphia lady somewhat sniffily. To this, few San Franciscans would seriously demur. But they would certainly add that in San Francisco, they have, in the copying process, learned how to do it better. A cold war has raged for years between the social capitals of the East and West Coasts, and nothing pleases an Easterner more than an opportunity to put a San Franciscan in his place. In Boston not long ago, a San Francisco woman was being entertained at a party on Beacon Hill, and, before dinner, was offered a cocktail—that curious Bostonian concoction, the Sweet Martini. When, in due time, no second drink was offered, the San Francisco lady turned to her hostess and, holding out her empty glass, said brightly, “In San Francisco, we have a saying—‘You can’t fly on one wing!’” Her hostess smiled coolly and replied, “In Boston, we fly on one wing.”
Though the pick and shovel did indeed come first to San Francisco, and though several mining fortunes were quickly made, most of them were quickly spent. The most substantial money in the city today represents fortunes made in places where the miners spent theirs. San Francisco’s famous Big Four, for instance—Charles Crocker, Collis P. Huntington, Leland Stanford, and Mark Hopkins—were Sacramento merchants who collected the little sacks of gold that the miners brought down from the hills, and parlayed them into fortunes large enough to build the Central Pacific and Southern Pacific Railroads. Then there was another quartet of families—the Floods, the Fairs, the Mackays, and the O’Briens—the great Irish “Silver Kings” of the Comstock Lode, who quickly put their Comstock fortunes to work in other areas. (From the Fairs, San Francisco acquired its Fairmont Hotel; Clarence H. Mackay made millions in telephones, telegraphs, and cables.)
These eight names are still liberally sprinkled throughout the pages of the San Francisco telephone book. They might be called the core of the San Francisco Social Register. To them have been added names from more recent—but only slightly more recent—banking, mercantile, and shipping fortunes, names such as Sutro, Blyth, and Monteagle (finance), Spreckels (sugar), Folger (coffee), Ghirardelli (chocolate), and Lapham (shipping). Other now impeccable San Francisco families include the Newhalls (married to Spreckelses and O’Briens), the Metcalfs (married to Huntingtons), the Hendersons (married to Crockers), the Redingtons (John Redington is married to Diana Crocker; William W. Crocker lives on Redington Road), the Nickels (married to Morses, of the Code family), the Meins (married to Nickels), the Olivers (married to Fays), the Tobins (married to Fays and de Youngs), the Thieriots (married to Tobins and de Youngs), the Millers (married to Folgers), and the Fays (married to Millers, Meins, Tobins and practically everybody else).
Also important to San Francisco Society are a number of wealthy Jewish families—the Haases, the de Youngs, the Hellmans, the Zellerbachs, the Dinkelspiels, the Schwabachers, and the Fleishhackers, to mention a few—and, because members of these families have intermarried with non-Jewish Society families, a number have found their way into the Social Register, despite that publication’s customary “policy.” “We are fortunate,” says a San Francisco woman, “in having a perfectly lovely group of Jewish people here.” This sentiment is echoed almost as often as those extolling San Francisco’s hilltop views of the Bay. With it, of course, goes the implication that the Jewish families should feel fortunate, too, to be so favorably regarded.
Local retailing money is represented socially by the Prentis Cobb Hales (Hale Brothers’ department store), the Carl Livingstons (Livingstons’ specialty store), the Magnins (I. Magnin & Company, another specialty store), the Hector Escobosas (he is president of I. Magnin), the James Ludwigs (head of the local Saks Fifth Avenue), and the Baldocchis. (Podesta Baldocchi is a chic flower shop but, as one matron puts it, “All the Baldocchis aren’t in flowers, just as all the Aliotos aren’t in fish. Alioto’s is an eating establishment on Fisherman’s Wharf.)
One factor that has helped the rapid growth of a Social Establishment in San Francisco has certainly been the burgeoning growth of the city itself. San Franciscans bewail the presence of so many “new people,” but the new people have certainly done their share to make things pleasanter for those who have been there somewhat longer. Since many of the makers of early fortunes bought land, the present generation is not only rich by inheritance but growing richer. For example, when Mrs. George T. Cameron’s father, the late Meichel H. de Young, told her he was making her a gift of “some sand dunes,” Mrs. Cameron thought little of it. It did not occur to her that, after a few years, those dunes would form a considerable piece of metropolitan real estate, now being divided into building lots selling for thousands of dollars apiece.
In San Francisco it is possible to see that being a member of an emerging elite can be a complicated experience—giddy, and yet baffling; full of unexpected pleasures, and yet at the same time full of unforeseen headaches. With plentiful money, which everyone in San Francisco Society has begun to take for granted, and with the idea of “Society” still a fresh, bright, important-seeming notion, it is certainly fun to pamper oneself. A kind of careless self-indulgence that was characteristic of Eastern Society a generation ago, in the 1920’s, now pervades the San Francisco air. A generation from now, frivolity may have gone out of fashion, but at the moment it is still fun in San Francisco to dash off to Scandinavia in search of a pair of “really good house servants,” as one couple recently did. It is still fun to buy up whole rooms from French châteaux, have them dismembered, shipped home, and reassembled in suburban Burlingame, a practice which palled in other sections of the country three decades ago, at least. No one in San Francisco is bored with his gold-plated bathroom fixtures. Many houses are still putting them in, and the old line, first attributed to Mrs. Stotesbury, about gold being easy to care for “because it doesn’t need polishing” is being trotted out all over the town. Dorothy Spreckels Munn’s chinchilla bedspread is not considered in the least outré. It is fun.
It is fun to dress up in white tie and tails or a long gown twice a week, and sit in a golden box at the Opera—though Opera-going in Eastern cities has become a pastime for older folks. In San Francisco it is fun to dress up for all occasions—and here, of course, is where the city’s climate has been such a boon to fashion-minded women. It is “dress-up weather” for suits, hats, furs, gloves, and jewelry all year round. San Francisco is known as one of the world’s dressiest cities, and San Franciscans would not have it otherwise. While Boston women “have a hat,” and are said never to need to buy one, San Francisco ladies buy hats by the dozens of dozens; they may even wear bits of veiling and fluff in their hair for luncheon in their own houses, and carry silk reticules from room to room. In San Francisco it is fun to have small, informal luncheons cooked to perfection by an imported Swiss chef, with two wines and gold utensils, served in Directoire plates at a table decked with scores of saucer-sized camellias fresh from the garden.
Lest such pleasurable splendors seem vulgar, great care is taken to make them seem effortless, even ordinary, and yet authoritative and correct. San Franciscans make it a point to know good food from bad, véritable French furniture from reproductions, diamonds from rhinestones, mink from muskrat. San Francisco Society works with astonishing intensity at making itself the genuine article, not an imitation. Great stress is placed on manners. “Never point,” one San Francisco mother teaches her children, “except at French pastry.” Do’s and don’ts are rampantly important. “We’d never wear diamonds before lunch,” says one woman. “Anyone who’d wear a mink stole in the daytime is automatically out,” says another. “I think it’s almost insulting not to serve wine with meals,” says Mrs. Michael Tobin. “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.”
San Francisco people believe in entertaining in their homes, and this is one of the most house-proud cities in America. It matters little whether one’s house is large or small, built last year or “before the fire”; what matters is how it is “done,” and how it is run. San Francisco is an interior decorator’s paradise. “We wouldn’t dream of asking anyone to dinner in a public restaurant,” says one young hostess. “I can’t remember when I was last inside one.” Sixteen for dinner is her favorite number; usually it is black tie. There is a strong Southern flavor, carefully cultivated, in San Francisco; many Gold Rush families came from the South, and at the time of the Civil War, it was touch and go whether California would side with the Union or the Confederacy. When you are entertained in some of the houses of San Francisco Society, it is often possible to imagine yourself on a plantation in antebellum Virginia.
Public interest in the doings of Society has gone somewhat stale in the East. Not so in San Francisco. While apathy and indifference have reduced Society pages to a few columns in New York, San Francisco Society receives page after page of fulsome flowing attention in the daily press, and twice as much on Sundays. And this news, furthermore, is read by everyone in the state of California. The opening of the San Francisco Opera is more than a major social function; it is a public pageant and fashion show, with worshipful teenagers lining the streets beforehand. At the annual Opera Fol de Rol, an Opera Guild benefit at which the stars give free performances, the main floor of the Civic auditorium is filled by the few hundred Society sponsors who buy tables, but the vaulting gallery above is packed with some six thousand non-Society faces which gasp and crane forward as each new Society figure makes an entrance. After one of these affairs, a housewife from the gallery said, “Of course I love to hear the artists sing, but the real reason I come is to see the Society women in their beautiful dresses.” Opera patronage has become the most profitable avenue for the San Francisco social climber, as it was in New York in the days of Otto Kahn.
Riding up Washington Street in a taxi recently, a visitor was surprised to have the driver point, with more than a touch of civic pride, to the A. B. Spreckels mansion. He then proceeded to describe some of the features of the house—the $30,000 French commodes, the wall-to-wall carpeting in the servants’ rooms, the $25,000 motor-operated movable glass swimming-pool enclosure with its $2000 built-in radiant-heating mechanism, its owner’s venerable custom-built wicker-sided Rolls-Royce with its mink lap robe and, of course, Dorothy Spreckels Munn’s celebrated chinchilla bedspread. The taxi driver had seen none of these things (except the Rolls), but he loyally approved of all of them. (Though San Franciscans never tire of deploring the “showiness” of Los Angeles, San Franciscans nonetheless allow their houses to be photographed for use on tourist postcards.)
But for all the fun of cultivating the grand manner, there are drawbacks. A developing Society can develop growing pains, and in San Francisco, one of these has been a fierce social competitiveness which, more than anything else, is reminiscent of the New York of Edith Wharton in The Age of Innocence. San Francisco has an obsessive concern with class. Newcomers, who may not realize it, are carefully sized up and then ticked off according to a local shorthand system. To the question, “What’s so-and-so like?” the answer may be, “N.O.C.D.,” which means, “Not our class, dearie.” Acceptable souls are classified O.C.D., while those with no class are labeled N.C. A fourth category is P.C., which stands, according to one young San Franciscan, for “Pittsney-Classney,” and that, according to another, is San Francisco baby talk that means “fifth class—the kind of people who sit in the dress circle at the Opera, and who serve potato-chip dips made out of dried onion soup mix and sour cream.”
San Francisco Society is divided into sets and cliques and circles and the circles intersect, and meet, and blur like rings on a college beerhall table—with an effect just about as chaotic and untidy. Everyone has his group, but each group exists at the expense of another group, and the rivalry is stern and sometimes ferocious. There is, of course, an older group and a younger group, and a quiet group and a “jetty” group, but it doesn’t stop there. “We have,” as one of the younger non-jetty group explains, “our A Group—the people we adore and can’t see too much of. Then we have the B Group, containing people we adore less. Then we have the Bidet Group, our little nickname for the people connected with the European embassies and consulates in the city, and the Wetback Group—people with the Latin American consulates. Of course we put some of the Wetback Group and the Bidet Group into the A Group, and some into the B Group, and often we invite the A Group and the B Group together, but there’s sort of a subsection of the B Group which we call the C Group, who are the people we see only about once a year, at Christmastime.”
Then there is the Political Group—“People who get terribly interested in politics and who are always inviting the mayor for dinner,” and there is a Mumsy Group—“Their daughters come out in the afternoon, at little teas,” and a Dress-Up Group which buys its clothes in Rome and Paris and whose daughters come out at spectacular balls. Each of these groups is convinced the other is doing it wrong. There is an organization known as the Spinsters, a post-debutante club rather than a group but, according to a member, the Spinsters splinter into groups of their own. The Spinsters’ male counterparts are called the Bachelors. The Spinsters give a flossy ball each year, and shortly after it, the Bachelors give a flossy ball “to repay the Spinsters and certain debutantes to whom the Bachelors are indebted.” The Bachelors stress that only certain debutantes are invited. “Others will knock vainly for admission to our ball,” says one Bachelor. There is also an informal men’s group called the Downtown Operators’ Association which strives for social acceptance but which, according to Gorham Knowles, a former president of the Bachelors, is made up of men who couldn’t get into the Bachelors. The Downtown Operators, needless to say, don’t give a ball of any kind.
San Francisco Society is terribly worried these days that it may be getting too big, and that too many people who don’t deserve to may be managing to get themselves in. “To be accepted here, a new person simply must be attractive,” says one woman. She suggests that newcomers seeking acceptance by Society arrive with at least two letters of introduction and recommendation. Then, she explains, “We’ll give them the go-around with invitations once. If they seem attractive, we’ll give them the go-around a second time. After that, we’ll either drop them or take them in. If we drop them, I’m very afraid they’re dropped for good.” San Francisco insists that the social fatalities are numerous and that, as a result, the number of people who are in Real Society remains small. San Francisco is not at all embarrassed to admit that it is snobbish. “Frankly, I’m a snob,” Mrs. Michael Tobin has said. “So many unattractive people have come to California that I’m determined to see to it that my children mingle only with their own kind.”
San Francisco Society is now in a kind of social-arbiter stage, as the East was a couple of generations back. It is in a Ward McAllister phase, and a short while ago it lost an excellent local equivalent of that famous screener. He was, of all things, a headwaiter. Just as Mr. McAllister used to maneuver guests into, and keep others out of, Mrs. Astor’s gold-and-white ballroom, so Ernest, headwaiter in the St. Francis Hotel’s Mural Room, conferred social status upon some and stripped it from others. One of the city’s most venerable traditions is “Monday lunch” at the St. Francis. This lunch, attended by all of San Francisco’s would-be and actual socialites, as well as by columnists from the press who make avid note of who is there, includes a fashion show which is somewhat desultory since the real show is at the tables where San Francisco ladies are eating. (The forty-year-old tradition supposedly began when certain ladies decided to make it publicly clear that they were not bound to the ordinary chores of washday.) For over a generation Ernest smoothly seated the best San Francisco women at the best tables—on either side of the center aisle, the closer to the door the better. Slightly less important women were accommodated on the encircling balcony. Climbers of the garden variety were placed in the outer reaches of the room, called Siberia. As a woman either advanced socially or slid down the social scale, Ernest, with corklike dryness, saw to it that her table location changed accordingly. Like all arbiters of elegance, Ernest was incorruptible, unmoved by the most lavish bribery. One learned to dread his look of icy disapproval as he accepted the too large tip. Alas, Ernest is no more. His replacement in the Mural Room is doing his best, but according to one woman, “He has made a number of serious mistakes.”
San Francisco is competitive about addresses, and which suburban area is “better”—Marin County to the north, or the Peninsula to the south—is a point of stormy controversy and hard feeling. “Burlingame is San Francisco’s Long Island,” says an old-time resident of Ross (in Marin County), implying that Burlingame is all rather nouveau riche and dreadful. “Really, I don’t see why anyone would want to live there—you might as well be living in Akron.” Burlingame counters such snide comments by referring to Marin County as “pure-push Marin” because, according to one woman, “Marin people are pushy—purely pushy.” “Of course,” says a Burlingame woman, “people do still move out to Marin, but I don’t know what happens to them. They sort of disappear, and we never see them again.”
Burlingame, with its elegant country club housed in an old Crocker mansion, undoubtedly outranks Marin in snob appeal and, probably, in per capita wealth as well. But even in Burlingame things are not entirely stable. Brushing Burlingame so closely that it is hard to tell where one leaves off and the other begins is the somewhat amorphous township of Hillsborough. Of the two places, everyone agrees that Hillsborough is better, but you must be careful when you use the word Hillsborough as an address. “We always say we live in Burlingame,” says Mrs. Tobin, who actually lives in Hillsborough. “If you hear people say they live in Hillsborough, you can be certain they are parvenus or climbers.”
Still another social island, south of Burlingame, is the more rural and woodsy town of Woodside, and though Woodside and Burlingame people understand each other and have not formed mutually exclusive groups, there is the general feeling that Burlingame people are the more stylish, while Woodside people are horsier, and go in for dog breeding, Black Angus, and polo.
A newcomer soon finds that not only is it wise to look askance at, and speak with disfavor of, Los Angeles; it is also well to deplore Oakland and Piedmont across the Bay. “Over there,” says a San Francisco woman with a Piedmontward wave of her hand, “they put on their jewels for breakfast and wear long, sweeping gowns for tea.” San Franciscans are willing to admit that there may be a Society in Portland and Seattle—a greater likelihood of it in Portland—and, just possibly, in Denver. But they give the nod to hardly any other Western cities. The rolling coastal range of mountains, the rich towns of the Central Valley, the Sierras, the Rockies—they might just as well not exist. As far as Society is concerned, Society recommences at the Pennsylvania Turnpike where, in terms of which Eastern prep school or college one’s son attends, the San Francisco competitiveness and rivalry starts all over again.
New York, Philadelphia, and Boston do not spend much time arguing over who, in each city, is that city’s Social Leader. In San Francisco this is a matter of fierce importance and, as the arguments rise to battle pitch, a certain frontier flavor pervades the San Francisco air—an odor of saloons and gunsmoke—and, with several able-bodied contenders for top position, the fights are about as orderly as a Barbary Coast poker party. Beneath a veneer of politeness and gentility lurk the scruples and politics of the mining camp. Social claim-jumping goes on all the time and, whenever it occurs, the socially dispossessed quickly muster their forces and charge out red-eyed for revenge. “I think we must all agree,” said one woman at a cocktail party recently, “that Helen Cameron is unquestionably the social leader of San Francisco.” The woman to whom she was speaking, obviously of a different camp, replied sweetly, “Oh, I agree that Helen is a darling. I simply adore her. She’s one of my dearest friends, but—” She let the sentence hang a moment, heavy with unspoken meaning, and then added, “Well …” And then she smiled and said, “After all …” (One of the “problems” with de Young was that he was Jewish.)
There has never been an undisputed social leader in San Francisco. There are only disputed ones. Other than Mrs. Cameron, there is her sister, Mrs. Nion Tucker, but Mrs. Tucker may be slightly behind Mrs. Charles Blyth, whose house in Burlingame, “Strawberry Hill,” is one of the most beautiful estates in California. Though placed in retirement for a while after the death of her banker husband, Mrs. Blyth has since made, according to a friend, “a very strong comeback,” and now considers herself “the grandest woman in San Francisco.” But another lady who considers herself equally grand is Mrs. Blyth’s neighbor and arch rival, Mrs. Edmunds Lyman. When Mrs. Blyth gave a party a while back for the visiting Queen of Holland, the Lymans were not invited. (To make the snub as inconspicuous as possible, the Lymans hastily scheduled a trip to Hawaii and were out of town on the day of the party.) Mrs. Lyman was overheard to murmur, “Kay Blyth seems obsessed with the idea of entertaining royalty these days. Is it true she’s thinking of changing the name of ‘Strawberry Hill’ to ‘The Orangerie’?”
Then there are Mrs. Paige Monteagle and Mrs. Kenneth Monteagle, sisters-in-law who appear together from time to time looking cordial but who, it is generally assumed, actually loathe one another. Hard feeling is said to stem from the time their mother-in-law died and one of the items left behind was a huge grid of diamonds. The daughters-in-law flipped a coin for the stones, and Mrs. Kenneth Monteagle won the toss, but her sister-in-law is said to feel that those diamonds would look far better on her own bosom. Socially, each woman has her own crops of staunch backers. “Lucile is an absolute peach,” says one group. “But Louise—” And, says another group, “Louise is the most marvelous woman alive. On the other hand, Lucile—” And so it goes.
“I detest the term ‘social leader,’ simply detest it!” says Mrs. Robert Watt Miller. “It implies a certain amount of striving, don’t you think?” Actually, with rather little striving, she herself might be considered a social leader. She is the dowager of the large and prosperous Miller clan, and her daughter Marian is one of San Francisco’s great beauties. But the Millers may have a certain black mark against them, too. They came originally from Oakland.
For the most part, however, since San Franciscans cannot compete with the East on the old-family level, they choose to turn that shortcoming into an asset. Mrs. Miller, for example, was a Folger. “My father’s family came from Nantucket,” she explains—where Folgers can still be found—“and they were all pirates, but as far as I know none of them were jailbirds, quite.” And as for the great Flood family, young James Flood, a banker, rancher, and yachtsman, makes no bones of the fact that his grandfather was a bartender and his grandmother a chambermaid. “Why should he?” asks a friend. “The point is that Floods today are ladies and gentlemen.” Another San Franciscan says, “Isn’t it better to come up in the world than down?” And everyone enjoys citing the case of the elegant and ancient Markoe family of Philadelphia. (The Markoes, originally Marcous, were a French Huguenot family who settled in St. Croix, Virgin Islands, in the seventeenth century, a few of whom migrated north to America prior to the Revolution; when Mrs. Gordon Fetterman, a family-proud descendant of the first American Markoes, journeyed to St. Croix not long ago in a search for distant cousins, she found a few but was unprepared for the fact that all the Virgin Island Markoes are now Negroes.) Today, according to one San Franciscan, “The really chic thing is to be able to find one honest-to-gosh prostitute in your family tree.”
One of the younger set in San Francisco says, “It takes three generations of education and breeding to rub the rough edges off first-generation money. That’s the state San Francisco is in today—all the roughness smoothed out.” And yet, oddly enough, one San Francisco woman who, though she might not exactly qualify as a social leader, certainly belongs among the city’s grandes dames, has, on the surface, what might appear as rough edges. She is Mrs. Adolph B. Spreckels—tall, stately and imposing, but a woman who slaps her knee loudly and roars at a good joke. Mrs. Spreckels’s Washington Street house, high on a hill overlooking the Bay and most of the city, is a fantastic whitestone sculpture with so many carved garlands and furbelows on its facade that, in the San Francisco sunshine, it glitters like a confection of spun sugar which, when you remember where the money comes from, perhaps it is. Yet its mistress is forthright, direct, anything but delicate, and, when she encounters artificiality (or “a phony” as she calls it), or rudeness, she responds with a total squelch. (Once, when Elsa Maxwell asked her how old she was, Mrs. Spreckels replied, “Old enough to remember when there was no such person as Elsa Maxwell.”)
Mrs. Spreckels has met, known, and been entertained by nearly every member of the European royalty of her time. But when her daughter, Dorothy Munn, sent her a photograph of herself sitting next to the Duke of Windsor, along with a note that said coyly, “Look who I’m sitting with!” Mrs. Spreckels said, “Well, I give up. Who is it?” She is a good friend of King Frederick and Queen Ingrid of Denmark and points out, “I’ve got a signed photograph of them hanging in my bathroom.” Another friend was Queen Marie of Rumania. “The Queen gave me a lot of gold furniture,” she says. “I kept it out in the hall for a while.” Among the pieces was the Queen’s gold throne; “very comfortable,” says Mrs. Spreckels. The precious collection now resides in the Maryhill Museum in the state of Washington, one of several museums for which Mrs. Spreckels is entirely or partly responsible. (Once, referring to the royal furniture, Mrs. Spreckels said with a wink, “Actually, pet, I bought it,” meaning that the Queen parted with it in return for a contribution to a favorite royal cause.)
With the millions left by Adolph Spreckels when he died, his widow began an enormous and continuing program of personal and public philanthropy. Her most impressive gift has been the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in Lincoln Park, a replica of the Palais de la Legion d’Honneur in Paris. This was erected not as a memorial to herself or her husband, but to the California men who lost their lives in World War I. The building alone cost three and a half millions when it was built, and Mrs. Spreckels added a vast art collection. She also established the San Francisco Maritime Museum and gave it a collection. More recently, she has assembled a collection devoted to the dance and theatre which she hopes will one day become the nucleus of still another museum. The cavernous garages of her house have for many years been used as a Salvage Shop which she runs for the benefit of at least five different causes. During World War II she entertained servicemen continually and always presented each man’s wife with an electric washing machine from what was apparently an inexhaustible supply. Those around her insist that if her unpublicized gifts were ever tallied they would far exceed her public ones.
She is, however, far from one’s vision of a Lady Bountiful. She likes to entertain guests in her bedroom. Coming in from a busy day, she will toss a large floppy hat over the swan’s-neck post of her bed (“A king made love in it, of course”) and accept a drink from her butler while she removes her stockings, talking full-steam to her visitors all the while. She may also entertain in one of her bathrooms. There are twenty-five, all capacious, and for years she kept a bridge table set up in each in case a foursome happened to gather there. She makes a game of trying to shock people, and judges people by their reactions to some of her more startling actions and pronouncements. She has been known to arrive for a quick, unscheduled visit to her Palace of the Legion of Honor with a mink blanket around her shoulders and nothing else on but a nightgown and a pair of bedroom slippers. She is fond of asking casual acquaintances over for a swim in her covered pool, and then adding, “Of course I swim in the raw—hope you don’t mind, pet.” She is descended from a titled French family named de Bretteville which emigrated to Denmark many generations ago, and was fairly impoverished by the time her branch of it joined the California Gold Rush and, as it turned out, found very little gold. She is proud of the fact that, as a young woman—before she met Mr. Spreckels—she used to walk two miles a day to save a five-cent streetcar fare. She is also proud of her full name, Alma Emma Charlotte Corday le Normand de Bretteville Spreckels, and claiming Marat’s murderess in her family tree, usually adds, “Got anybody you want murdered, pet? I’m your girl!” At a luncheon which she gave for friends and patrons of her museums last year, she grew bored with the speeches, all of which extolled her and her good deeds and, finally, after a particularly fulsome paean, she turned to the speaker and, in her whiskey-tenor voice inquired, “Want to hear something dirty in Danish?” The speaker, nonplussed, nodded yes. Mrs. Spreckels then uttered a few Danish words. “Very interesting, dear Mrs. Spreckels, but what does it mean?” asked the speaker. “Fire up your behind!” cried Mrs. Spreckels.
One of San Francisco’s great blood feuds has been conducted between the Spreckels family and the de Youngs. This is said to have resulted from old “Mike” de Young’s use of his San Francisco Chronicle as an occasional instrument of blackmail. (There was the curious case of old Mr. Charles Crocker who, back in the 1880’s, built a superlative mansion on Nob Hill, moved in, and, exactly one month later, moved out in a strange hurry, whereupon the Crocker mansion suddenly became de Young’s mansion. It is widely assumed de Young “had something” on Crocker, and the house was the price of keeping it out of the newspaper.) De Young, according to the Spreckels family, also tried to frame Adolph Spreckels. In any case, one day Mr. Spreckels strode down to the Chronicle’s office, up to de Young’s desk, and fired point-blank at the publisher—who ducked, and the bullet missed its mark. Today the feud is quiescent, and whenever Mrs. Spreckels has “Monday lunch” at the St. Francis, she greets Mr. de Young’s daughters, Mrs. Cameron and Mrs. Tucker. The greeting is more polite than cordial. As she once pointed out, “Those de Young women are nice, but we just can’t be very intimate since my husband shot their father.”
Like many very rich people, although she has given away more millions than she can remember, Mrs. Spreckels resents being asked outright for money. When the staff of the Palace of the Legion of Honor organized a baseball team a while back, it found itself fifty dollars short of the amount needed to buy uniforms. The team, wondering whether the Palace of the Legion of Honor’s wealthy benefactress might help out, approached her. The team, its manager told her, was to be called the A. B. Spreckels Memorial Baseball Team. Mrs. Spreckels nodded approvingly. The A. B. Spreckels Memorial Team needed, however, fifty dollars for uniforms, and perhaps—“What!” cried Mrs. Spreckels. She flung open her reticule and poured its contents—lipstick, emery boards, matches, a few coins, a handkerchief—on the table. “Where do you expect me to get fifty dollars?” she cried. “You people have got my skin. Now you want my guts!”
Mrs. Spreckels’s less conventional antics dismay San Francisco Society; there is a feeling that someone as rich as she should be somewhat more genteel. But Mrs. Spreckels has discovered—and made the discovery long ago—that there is more to being a grande dame than gentility or a broad A. To be a grande dame one must have, among other things, the assurance to be one. Confidence of mind and clarity of purpose matter more than the Grand Manner. Grandness need have nothing to do with breeding, either, but merely with one’s scale of thinking. Grandes dames such as Alma Spreckels are far above caring what other people think.
San Franciscans sometimes seem to harbor a mystical sense of mission—that they have been given the duty of introducing Good Form and the Right Thing to the wild and woolly West. San Francisco’s social bellwethers are the great Eastern social cities, and San Francisco seems continually to be asking itself what the East might think. And yet, at the same time, one of the grandest ladies of Eastern Society is the spiritual cousin of Mrs. Spreckels. She is Mrs. Robert Homans of Boston, the former Abigail Adams, a descendant of two United States Presidents, a niece of both Henry Adams and Brooks Adams, and the present dowager of the ancient and distinguished Adams clan. Mrs. Homans possesses Mrs. Spreckels’s same social audacity and verve, and ability to plunge forthrightly into situations that would surely daunt lesser folk. Once, when Beacon Street had become impassable in a blizzard, Mrs. Homans ordered her taxi to stop in front of her husband’s club, the august Somerset Club, and demanded a room for the night. When the club politely explained that it had a rule against giving rooms to unescorted women, Mrs. Homans said, “Very well. In that case, I’ll go out and get my taxi driver.” She got her room. Now a widow in her seventies, whose hair style has not changed in forty years, she says, “When it comes to style, Boston doesn’t have much. We all have what we call a hat. You know, they cover your head. My daughter makes me burn them now and then.” Like Mrs. Spreckels, she is a woman above style. Though she calls herself “the last of the old Adamses,” she insists that Boston still has “a regular Society, a regime under which you live and do the things you ought to do.” Among the things she feels she ought to do is spend at least ten hours a day turning over her fortune to educational, cultural, and philanthropic institutions with incredibly little fanfare. And of course the existence of such a regime does not prevent Abigail Adams Homans from doing exactly what she likes. Her social position is so secure that, as she says, “If I stood in the Common on my head, people’d say, ‘Oh, that’s just Abigail Adams.’ They wouldn’t pay any attention. We’re conventionally independent.”
Mrs. Homans’s son, Robert Homans, Jr., is married to the Winthrop Aldrich’s daughter, Mary, thereby joining two of the most redoubtable families of New York and Boston. The young Homanses live quiet, successful, and conventionally independent lives in San Francisco.