The Great Museum War
For all its interest in art and culture, San Francisco remained for many years somewhat parochial in its tastes and tended to lavish praise on the works of local artists at the expense of anything foreign or even from out of town. As late as 1936 the art critic of the San Francisco News would be saying that the frescoes on the Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill were better than anything that had been painted by Vincent Van Gogh. Van Gogh, according to this critic, was an “amateur” and his paintings “worthless daubs.” Van Gogh’s art, furthermore, was “imported,” and his fame was the result of “paid ballyhoo.” The conclusion: “If Van Gogh was a great artist, we have lots of great artists in the Bay Region.” Of course anything from southern California was disparaged, though this same critic did once condescendingly admit that a painter from Los Angeles named Barse Miller was, of all things, “a good artist.… That Miller may not always achieve what he strives for is beside the point. What artist does?”
Art, meanwhile, had become a valuable tool for social climbing—a pastime in which Mr. and Mrs. Adolph Spreckels had surprisingly little interest. In fact, the northern California branch of the Spreckels family, in addition to wanting to outdo Mr. de Young, genuinely appeared to want to give a resplendent museum to the city.
In their efforts, of course, they could not count on the support of the Chronicle, which continued to plague Adolph Spreckels. (Once de Young went so far as to hire a prostitute who was instructed to lure Mr. Spreckels to bed, where, if the plan had worked, the Chronicle intended to surprise and photograph him.) But they did receive support from another powerful San Francisco press figure, William Randolph Hearst.
Like Adolph Spreckels, Mr. Hearst cared little about San Francisco society—nor did San Francisco society care much for him. After marrying a New York woman named Millicent Willson, he had more or less abandoned her for a mistress, whom he kept in Sausalito. Later came his long involvement with the actress Marion Davies. All of this scandalized San Francisco society, and society was even more irked by the fact that Hearst didn’t mind being ostracized. He flaunted his profligate life-style.
Hearst’s feud with de Young was almost as long-standing as Spreckels’. His father, George Hearst, had come, like de Young’s, from Missouri in 1850, but George Hearst had been much more successful. At a time when everyone was speculating in gold stocks George Hearst bought a good one, in the Homestake Mine in South Dakota. Soon he was worth several hundred million dollars. He then invested in silver and copper, and was lucky again, with the Anaconda Mine in Montana. His holdings expanded to include mines in Mexico, ranches in California and South America, and, almost by accident, an ailing San Francisco newspaper called the Examiner. George Hearst sent his only son, William, to Harvard, which promptly expelled him. Casting about for something to do, William Randolph Hearst asked his father for the Examiner. Reluctantly—the senior Hearst had hoped for something more “respectable” than newspaper work for his son—the Examiner was turned over to William Randolph Hearst in 1887.
Immediately W. R. Hearst set about outdoing the Chronicle in the luridness of its stories. On the first day of young Hearst’s stewardship the Examiner’s front-page headlines read:
DEAD BABIES:
BLOODY WORK:
MORE GHASTLY LIGHT ON THE SLAUGHTER OF
THE INNOCENTS:
THE DARK MYSTERIES OF A GREAT CITY
Like Michael de Young, Hearst was theater-struck. It was Hearst who had seen the news potential in Sarah Bernhardt’s San Francisco debut in Fedora and had orchestrated her much publicized arrival. A Hearst reporter had escorted her through Chinatown, taken her to a Chinese theater where she had made good copy by walking onstage and chatting with the actors, and accompanied her to an opium den, where, at the sight of dazed bodies lying about in the gloom, La Divine had exclaimed, “C’est magnifique!”—making more good copy. Hearst had infuriated de Young when it turned out that Bernhardt had agreed to give interviews exclusively to the Examiner. While the Chronicle imported grueling tales to San Francisco from wherever it could find them, Hearst reporters were instructed that when no startling news was available they were to create some of their own. A reporter might fling himself into the Bay and wait to see how long it took for someone to rescue him; or feign a suicide attempt from the roof of a high building in order to report the reactions from the street below: PRIEST WEEPS, CRIES TO SUICIDE: “DON’T JUMP!”
Hearst’s ambitions far outdistanced those of Michael de Young. De Young’s fortune was based primarily on his one newspaper. Hearst’s money, which was inherited, would carry him on to the ownership of some twenty newspapers across the United States, a stable of magazines, his own motion picture production company, a feature syndicate, a wire service, a newsreel company, and, at one point, more California real estate than any individual since Henry Miller. It would also carry him to the point, as a compulsive spender, at which he had very nearly spent it all. Hearst had no particular interest in building a new museum in San Francisco. He was, after all, busily building a private museum of his own at San Simeon—his hundred-and-fourteen-room Moorish castle, on a mountain overlooking the Pacific, composed of rooms and filled with furniture collected from all over the world—and his own private zoo. But he was interested in anything that would annoy Mike de Young, and so he happily lent the Examiner’s editorial support to Mrs. Spreckels and her museum.
It was, indeed, Mrs. Spreckels’ project, supported financially by her husband’s huge fortune. Of Mrs. Spreckels’ origins rather little is known, and throughout her lifetime that was the way she preferred things to be. She was born March 24, 1881, probably in San Francisco—though she was a little vague about that too—as Alma Emma de Bretteville. Later she would enjoy saying that her full name was Alma Emma Charlotte Corday le Normand de Bretteville, to which she would add for good measure “von Spreckelsen.” (She was somehow descended, or so she claimed, from Charlotte Corday, the mad French aristocrat who stabbed Marat in his bathtub, and in this connection, she would often open conversations with “Got anyone you want murdered?”) The De Brettevilles had been forced to leave France at the time of the Edict of Nantes and had fled to Denmark, whence Alma’s Danish-speaking parents had emigrated.
Alma Spreckels never liked to speak of her childhood, and it is assumed to have been mean and poor. But as a young woman her Junoesque figure and handsome if not beautiful face caused her to be much in demand as an artist’s model. In the early 1900s she posed, in long flowing robes, for the tall “Winged Victory” sculpture that stands at the top of the Dewey Monument in the center of San Francisco’s Union Square. And in various bay-front saloons there were said to be other poses of the well proportioned Miss de Bretteville without the robes. Her youth was apparently peripatetic, adventuresome. At one point in the 1890s she brought a lawsuit against a gold miner in the Klondike for “personal deflowering,” and was able to collect ten thousand dollars in personal damages. For a while she worked as a nurse for a family in Woodside, California. For a while too she studied art and art history at San Francisco’s Mark Hopkins Institute, and at the time of the great earthquake and fire of 1906 she helped salvage that institution’s collection of paintings and sculpture from the flames. In the quake’s aftermath she also showed her public-spirited side. San Franciscans were forbidden to build fires or to cook in their homes, and Alma de Bretteville organized communal cook kitchens in Golden Gate Park.
Just how this bohemian and free-spirited creature met Adolph B. Spreckels is unknown unless, as has been rumored, it was in one of the private rooms of the Old Poodle Dog, a San Francisco restaurant that also offered discreet accommodations to its patrons. But in 1908, in Philadelphia, Alma de Bretteville and Mr. Spreckels were married, not long after Adolph’s father had died and left him roughly half of the vast sugar fortune. She was twenty-seven and he was fifty-one. Adolph’s marriage fairly late in life would mean that his children would grow up as contemporaries of his brother John’s grandchildren.
The newlyweds spent their honeymoon making a grand tour of Europe, and returned to Mr. Spreckels’ white sugar-cake mansion, with its indoor swimming pool and third-floor ceiling of Tiffany glass, in Pacific Heights. At the time, San Francisco’s unquestioned Queen of Diamonds was Mrs. Leland Stanford, who was said to own more jewels than any crowned head in the world, with the exceptions of Queen Victoria and the Czarina of Russia. Her collection included four matching sets of diamond pieces, part of a million-dollar cache of stones that had belonged to Isabella of Spain. Each set consisted of a necklace, spray, earrings, tiara, bracelets, and pins. One set “emitted violet rays by day,” another was composed of yellow diamonds, the third of pink diamonds, and the fourth of pure white gems. Mrs. Stanford also owned a large pear-shaped black diamond and a necklace of varicolored diamonds said to be the finest necklace in the United States. She also owned sixty pairs of diamond earrings. Incredible though it seems, it was reported that she once wore her entire collection to a private dinner given by William E. Dodge, choosing a black dress with voluminous folds on which all her little ornaments could be pinned and clipped. Adolph Spreckels was eager to have his new wife enter into a competition for the title held by Jane Stanford. But Alma Spreckels cared little for jewelry, though she did accept several fine strands of pearls, two magnificent diamond clips, and several diamond-and-emerald pieces. Alma Spreckels was much more interested in art.
At the French pavilion of the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco, Mrs. Spreckels first became aware of and admired the works of Auguste Rodin. Soon she was off to France to visit Rodin in his studio, where the sculptor had recently completed “The Thinker.” Alma Spreckels liked “The Thinker,” and rather than pester her husband for the money, she simply pawned some jewelry and bought one of the eighteen castings of the sculpture for fourteen thousand dollars. (When her husband discovered what she had done, he was so embarrassed that he quickly retrieved the jewels from the pawnbroker.) She presented the statue to the city, and it was placed in Golden Gate Park. This was the germ of her idea to give San Francisco a museum that would concentrate on French art and culture. It would be called the California Palace of the Legion of Honor and would be designed as a replica of the Palais de la Légion d’Honneur in Paris. Before it was finished it would be declared also a memorial—not to Alma and Adolph Spreckels but to the California dead who had been killed in World War I. Originally Mrs. Spreckels had planned to build her museum directly across the street from her house. But with the help of her friend Loïe Fuller, she selected an even more dramatic site, on a high bluff in Lincoln Park overlooking the Pacific and the Golden Gate.
Though it was completely intuitive, Mrs. Spreckels’ choice of the Rodin sculpture as the focus of her museum was a shrewd one. A number of important private art collections had already been assembled in the East—in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. But for some reason, moneyed San Franciscans had been slow to turn to art collecting in any significant way. Perhaps it was because the West Coast had no great art dealers comparable to Nathan Wildenstein or Lord Duveen to encourage and guide the tastes of wealthy westerners. What San Francisco had instead was Solomon Gump and his sons, who started out supplying gilded cornices and mirrors for the mansions of the city’s new-rich millionaires. Gump’s store branched out into European and Oriental objets d’art, and he also sold paintings—primarily bosomy nudes—which decorated the walls of San Francisco’s best bars and fanciest brothels. The rest of the art sold by Gump’s consisted primarily of heavy and elaborate picture frames that housed large, dark, and undistinguished oil paintings; one had the impression that San Francisco paintings existed merely to show off their frames. In such a frame Gump’s had sold Collis P. Huntington a nude painting of the Empress Josephine. Otherwise, according to Leon Harris in Merchant Princes, Gump’s and San Francisco’s tastes ran to “socially acceptable subjects such as praying peasants, frolicking tots, noble animals, and inspiring landscapes.”
But there may have been another reason why San Franciscans had not collected great art. To San Francisco’s male-dominated society there was something sissified about paintings. The Impressionists in particular seemed both effete and effeminate. A painting of a charging buffalo or the massacre of an Indian tribe, on the other hand, was something that a San Francisco businessman could relate to. As for Rodin’s sculpture, it was both massive and monumental. Here was no “decadent” Degas or Corot or Manet. There was no question but that “The Thinker” was thoroughly muscular and masculine. Rodin was the perfect sculptor for San Francisco of the 1920s.
Still, though Alma Spreckels had the enthusiastic support of Mr. Hearst and the Examiner (while her endeavors were being virtually ignored by the Chronicle), and even though she had Rodin, she soon found that raising funds for her project would not be as easy as she had first supposed. Second-generation California rich, it seemed, were more interested in party-giving, opera-going, and being seen at the right tables in the Mural Room than in philanthropy. That was part of it. But part of it also had to do with Alma Spreckels’ almost overpoweringly imperious personal style. Like Mr. Hearst, she seemed to feel that she was above society, unaccountable to it, impervious to its little niceties and rules and regulations. She was chauffeured around town in a huge Rolls-Royce with basket-weave sides, her knees beneath a chinchilla lap-robe. She occasionally inspected the building site of her museum wearing one of her mountainous mink coats over nothing but a nightgown, her feet in bedroom slippers. She loved to shock. She liked to hold museum meetings in her bedroom, where she held court in a swan-shaped bed, and at one such gathering of distinguished civic leaders she opened the proceedings by announcing, “Guess what? I just found my cook in bed with the butler!” Once, during a lull in the conversation at a dinner party where the guests included impresario Sol Hurok, Mrs. Spreckels said suddenly in her loud voice, “Mr. Hurok, do you know why they won’t let Diaghilev dance in Russia?” Mr. Hurok did not know, and was no doubt bemused by the question, since Diaghilev, like Hurok, was an impresario, not a performer. “Because he won’t wear a jockstrap,” said Mrs. Spreckels.
In addition to her booming voice she had a haughty, almost baleful stare which she would fix on anyone who displeased her. Considering Alma Spreckels’ origins and somewhat questionable past, San Francisco society found her more than a little hard to take. But she could not be ignored. Once, on a gallery-going trip to New York with her curator, Thomas Carr Howe, she asked him if he would like to go to the theater that night and, if so, what he would like to see. Howe replied that the great Broadway hit of the moment was Lady in the Dark, starring a new-found comedian named Danny Kaye. Howe added that he doubted that they could get tickets. Fifteen minutes later a messenger delivered tickets for two seats in the third row on the center aisle to Mrs. Spreckels’ suite. Mrs. Spreckels, however, was unimpressed by Danny Kaye. In the middle of the first act, in a hoarse stage whisper that could be heard through half the house as well as across the footlights, Mrs. Spreckels cupped her hand against Howe’s ear and declared, “Mr. Howe, I think Danny Kaye is a fairy!”
She could, on the other hand, be gregarious and generous—if not to a fault, at least to a degree that was quite beyond the limits of San Francisco’s right-fork-conscious new high society. She was fond of asking acquaintances of both sexes to come for a swim with her in her indoor pool, invariably adding, “Of course, pet, I swim in the raw. Hope you don’t mind.” Those who had the temerity to accept her swimming invitations reported that she did indeed swim in the raw. Also, from time to time she liked having her chauffeur drop her off at various wharf-side saloons, where she enjoyed bellying up to the bar with sailors and stevedores and chatting with them in language even saltier than their own. She might be outrageous, but she was certainly not a snob. One afternoon, at the Spreckels country place, a huge ranch in Sonoma called Sobre Vista, a salesman selling pins and needles rang the doorbell. “See who’s there!” roared Mrs. Spreckels, and the salesman was ushered in. After a few moments of conversation Mrs. Spreckels asked, “Do you have a wife?” The salesman replied that he did. “Bring her over,” said Mrs. Spreckels. The salesman did, and he and his wife remained as Mrs. Spreckels’ houseguests for about a week.
She had a passion for bridge and a passion for very cold, very dry martinis; an icy pitcherful was never far from her reach. Bridge tables were set up in every room of her San Francisco house—even in the bathrooms, and there were twenty-five of these, all of them capacious—to be ready wherever and whenever a foursome showed up. Parties were called at the drop of a hat, or even sooner. Once, after a small electrical fire had broken out in the house and the fire department had been called, Mrs. Spreckels’ family returned late at night to find the firemen sitting around and downing martinis with their hostess. But her martini consumption never prevented her from rising at dawn and tackling her day with the energy of a Southern Pacific freight locomotive. She once woke up Henry Ford at 6:30 in the morning to ask him to donate a Model T for a raffle she was having for her museum. She got her Model T.
Pomp and formality and pretension bored her. When the late Elsa Maxwell, who considered herself both a San Franciscan and a social arbiter, once asked Mrs. Spreckels how old she was, Mrs. Spreckels replied, “Old enough to remember when there was no such person as Elsa Maxwell.” At a formal dinner that was followed by a long series of speeches—most of them extolling the civic virtues and cultural benefactions of Alma de Bretteville Spreckels—the honoree grew weary of the proceedings, and, turning to her companion, she asked in the familiar stage whisper, “Want to hear something dirty in Danish?” Her companion nodded, whereupon Mrs. Spreckels muttered a guttural, incomprehensible epithet. “But what does it mean?” her companion whispered. “Fire up your behind!” shouted Mrs. Spreckels. At one time she was required to have a cystoscopy, and afterward she asked a dinner companion if he had ever had such an experience. Wincing, he replied that he had and that it had been very painful. “Christ,” said Mrs. Spreckels, “if they do that sort of thing to the rich, what do they do to the poor?” She also once said, “If I weren’t rich, people would say I was crazy. As it is, I’m just eccentric.”
And she always got what she wanted. A luncheon guest at Sobre Vista once commented that the view from the terrace would probably be improved if a certain large tree were removed. The party then repaired to the dining room. After lunch the group gathered on the terrace again for coffee. The large tree was gone. It was the same way with her museum. When outside contributions proved insufficient for its construction, Mrs. Spreckels simply came up with her own money—some two million dollars all told before it was finished. She wanted an important Rodin collection. “The Thinker” was moved from Golden Gate Park to the museum’s courtyard, and Mrs. Spreckels also bought casts of such now famous Rodins as the “Prodigal Son” and the “Age of Bronze.” She bought some thirty-two other Rodin pieces, and by the time she had finished, the Rodin collection of the Legion of Honor was the largest in the Western Hemisphere. Inside the museum went French paintings, tapestries, rugs, porcelains, and crystal, all bought by Alma Spreckels. Influential friends were also helpful, including King Frederick and Queen Ingrid of Denmark. (“I’ve got a picture of them hanging in my bathroom,” she liked to say.) Queen Marie of Romania, on her famous tour of the United States, stopped to visit Mrs. Spreckels and presented to her a great deal of gold furniture, including the queen’s golden throne. (“Very comfortable throne,” said Mrs. Spreckels. “I kept some of the gold furniture out in my front hall for a while.”) Eventually, of course, all this furniture went to her museum. (“Actually, pet,” she once confided to a friend, “Queen Marie didn’t exactly give that furniture to me. I bought it from her.”)
When the Palace of the Legion of Honor opened its doors in November 1924, with a great ceremony attended by everyone of importance in the city (except the de Youngs), as well as by dignitaries and government officials representing both the United States and France, the occasion was such that not even the Chronicle could afford to ignore it. It was an international event. The great white marble Palace dominated Inspiration Point, a cultural capstone to a city that wished to create the illusion, at least, that it treasured culture above all other virtues (though, in fact, there were certain other obvious priorities). Throughout the dedication speeches and ceremonies there was only one sad note. Alma de Bretteville Spreckels was in widow’s weeds. Adolph Spreckels had not lived to see the result of his wife’s labors and his money. He had died in June of that year at the age of sixty-seven.
Though Spreckels and de Young were now both dead, the rivalry between the two museums went on for years, abetted by the partisanship of the Chronicle and the Examiner. Whenever a piece of art became available for acquisition, Mrs. Spreckels would cry, “Get it before the de Young!” In a sense the competitiveness of the two museums served them both well in that it made each try harder to obtain the best pieces and to display the best exhibits. But the tendency of each paper to run down the competition’s product probably resulted in simply confusing the museum-going public and prompted at least one East Coast observer to comment, “If you put the two San Francisco museums together, you’d end up with one mediocre museum.”
Early on, William Randolph Hearst had hired the brimstone-pen writer Ambrose Bierce as his art critic and had instructed him to write disparagingly of any exhibition presented at the de Young Museum. Bierce complied and had written of a typical de Young show that the quality of the art, “while always detestable, has this year attained a shining pinnacle of badness. The pictures next year will necessarily be better than the pictures of this, but alas, there may be be more of them.” Later Examiner art critics followed the Bierce example.
A great deal has been written about the demonic and despotic William Randolph Hearst, who treated kings and copyboys with the same disdain and impartiality. Yet those who knew him as a friend and host remember W.R., or “The Chief,” as he was called, as a kindly, rather shy and self-effacing man, full of uncertainties, whose primary wish seemed to be to make his guests feel comfortable and happy. Once, after visiting Hearst at San Simeon, The New Yorker editor Harold Ross commented, “I went expecting to meet Dracula, and went away feeling that I’d met Mr. Chips.” For years rumors circulated that Hearst had people killed who displeased him, and in particular that he poisoned (or shot, according to another version) movie producer Thomas Ince, who died shortly after dining on Hearst’s yacht, for making a pass at Marion Davies. Miss Davies herself denied the stories. Mr. Hearst’s guests and acquaintances, she explained, fell into four categories. “Either men worshiped W.R., or they worked for him, or they were our guests and gentlemen, or they hated W.R.’s guts but were scared of him,” she explained. None of these categories of men would have dreamed of making a pass at her.
Hearst’s one great character flaw—if, indeed, it was not a diagnosable neurosis—may have been that he was a compulsive spender. He acquired things wildly and erratically, buying priceless and worthless objects with the same reckless abandon. Like an alcoholic or a drug addict, he seemed to need a daily “fix” from spending huge sums of money. He bought rooms of castles, ceilings, frescoes, chandeliers, suits of armor, statues, paintings, tapestries, and enormous amounts of bric-a-brac that could only be described as junk. A psychologist would doubtless find in all this an expression of some deep and terrible insecurity. Over the years this ferocious habit escalated, and in the cavernous basement vaults of San Simeon, as well as in warehouses across the country, great crates of Hearst purchases piled up, many of them never opened. In the end his buying consumed him. The well of the Hearst fortune was not, as it had once seemed, bottomless. Though his publishing and motion picture empire yielded tens of millions of dollars a year in profits, they were eventually insufficient to support his habit, which, as it would turn out, would provide an ironic twist to San Francisco’s great museum war.
When Hearst died in 1951 he was at Miss Davies’ house in Beverly Hills. Miss Davies, according to her late account, had been up caring for him and reading to him much of the night and had taken a sleeping pill, so that when the end came she was in deep slumber. She may of course have been intoxicated. During his final illness Mr. Hearst had not been able to control Marion’s drinking problem, as he had struggled to do for over twenty years. In fact, he disliked anyone who drank and tried to control the drinking of everyone with whom he came in contact. At San Simeon, beer was served with lunch, and before dinner a cocktail—or occasionally two—was offered, along with copious hors d’oeuvres, including huge bowls of caviar. Wine was served with dinner, and after dinner, following the inevitable screening of a Hearst motion picture, usually starring Miss Davies, a guest might be lucky enough to be offered a goodnight highball. Aside from that, Hearst’s evenings were nonalcoholic, and any guest who appeared to be intoxicated received an icy stare from the host and was told, “A car is waiting to take you to the night train.” At dinner the Hearst butlers were instructed not to refill Miss Davies’ wineglass. Once, when the butler had passed behind her chair without offering her more wine, she cried out, “Oh, please, W.R., let me have some more champagne! After all, I never get cross at you when you drink.” “That is correct,” replied the host. “You only get cross at me when you drink.” To offset this situation Miss Davies kept a secret cache of liquor in the ladies’ dressing room, where it was stored in perfume bottles. Women guests repaired there to freshen their drinks.
In any case, when the nurses at Hearst’s bedside realized that he had died, Miss Davies could not be roused from sleep. A few days earlier, to try to prevent a financial debacle, she had lent him a million dollars. The first person notified of his death was Hearst’s widow, and by the time Marion Davies awoke, Hearst executives had removed The Chief’s body and every scrap of his possessions from her house. After thirty-two years as his mistress-companion-nurse, she was not permitted to bid him a final farewell. Nor was she allowed to attend his funeral in San Francisco. Millicent Hearst and her sons took charge of all arrangements. Though Marion had been specifically named in Hearst’s will as the sole voting power in the Hearst Corporation, pressure from the family forced her to relinquish that right.
The family then set about trying to recoup as much of Hearst’s exhausted fortune as it could by auctioning and selling off his vast accumulation of acquisitions. Because of Hearst’s liaison with Miss Davies, the Hearsts had for years been denied a listing in the San Francisco Social Register, and the family now set about trying to redeem themselves and their tarnished image in the eyes of San Francisco society. This they decided to do by presenting a particularly impressive collection of tapestries to the city. To the astonishment of everyone who was aware of the long Hearst–de Young feud, the gift was made to the de Young Museum.
The choice of the de Young may have been capricious. Or it may have been perverse, a way of notifying such of Mr. Hearst’s old friends as Mrs. Spreckels that they no longer wielded any power over his family. Of course the Chronicle fairly crowed with this news. Had Hearst himself been aware of it he would surely have been spinning furiously in his grave. The de Young Museum, on accepting the tapestries, announced that they would be displayed in an especially created new gallery to be called the Hearst Court. To the delighted de Young family it seemed as though the de Youngs had finally triumphed over William Randolph Hearst.
If Alma Spreckels was angry or even disappointed over these developments, she was wise enough to remain silent on the subject.