Wedding Bells
Perhaps as a result of Ned Greenway’s efforts to place the battling stars of San Francisco’s upper crust into some sort of fixed planetary system, by the turn of the century intermarriage among San Francisco’s wealthy families began to be surprisingly common, with marriages tending to take place “within the set.” The Newhalls married Spreckelses and O’Briens, the Metcalfs married Huntingtons, the Hendersons and Redingtons married Crockers, the Nickels married Morses (of the Code family), and the Meins married Nickels. To be sure, no Spreckels ever married a de Young, nor did a de Young marry a Hearst, nor did a Huntington ever marry a Stanford, but the Tobins married Fays and de Youngs, the Thieriots married Tobins and de Youngs, the Olivers married Fays, the Millers married members of the Folger family (of Folger’s coffee), and the Fays married Millers, Meins, and Tobins. Spreckelses married other Spreckelses.
Perhaps the most startling interclan marriage occurred within the Huntington family. Collis Huntington, like Leland Stanford, had spent much of his later life collecting residences. He had three large houses in California, a country home in Throgg’s Neck, New York, and a $250,000 “camp” in the Adirondacks when he decided that he also needed a New York City address. At the cost of several millions, an imposing pile was erected for him at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street. When the New York house was completed, however, Huntington could not be persuaded to live in it, having begun to subscribe to the superstition that men built houses only in order to die in them. He had already begun to prepare for this eventuality by ordering for himself in New York’s Woodlawn Cemetery (for another $250,000) a huge marble mausoleum, an edifice that took eight years to construct. (When in the end Mr. Huntington moved into the mausoleum, his widow moved into the Fifth Avenue house. She used it periodically until her own death in 1925, when the property was sold for $3,800,000 and razed to make way for a commercial building.)
Huntington had been married twice. His first wife, the former Elizabeth Stoddard, was so shy and retiring that for years San Francisco was not sure whether Huntington had a wife or not. They had no children, but adopted a daughter, Clara Prentice, who was the daughter of Mrs. Huntington’s dead sister. When the first Mrs. Huntington died, Huntington—with what seemed like unseemly speed—married again, this time a pretty widow named Arabella Worsham. Again there were no natural children, but the Huntingtons adopted the new Mrs. Huntington’s son by her previous marriage. Thus Collis P. Huntington became the legal father of his first wife’s niece and his own stepson. When Huntington died, a large share of his estate went to his widow, and some two million dollars was bequeathed to the adopted Clara. A much larger sum, however, was willed to Huntington’s favorite nephew, Henry E. Huntington, the son of Collis Huntington’s older brother, Solon Huntington.
Henry Huntington had in the meantime married Mary Alice Prentice, the sister of his uncle’s adopted daughter, thus turning two sisters into cousins by marriage as well, and making Clara Prentice Huntington’s stepmother her aunt. The complicated, near-incestuous Huntington family relationships seemed about to fall apart when Henry and Mary Alice Huntington were divorced. But the centrifugal forces were contained when Henry Huntington then married his uncle Collis’ widow. This had the effect of consolidating two large shares of Collis Huntington’s fortune, as well as turning Henry Huntington’s ex-wife’s sister into his own stepdaughter. “It is all,” said Henry Huntington at the time, “perfectly legal.” It did, however, make sorting out the kinships within the Huntington family something of a chore. And if Henry Huntington and Arabella Huntington Huntington had had offspring (which they did not), their children’s mother would have also been their great-aunt, and their father their second cousin. (San Francisco’s upper-crust Jewish families were equally intramural when it came to marriage. Two Neustadter brothers, Jacob and David, married two sisters, Dora and Josephine Dannenberg. Daniel Koshland married his first cousin, Eleanor Haas, of the Levi Strauss family, and went to work for the company that gave the world blue jeans.)
When the second-generation members of California’s new-rich families were not marrying each other they were scouring the capitals of Europe in search of titles to marry. The second generation had discovered two sad and interrelated facts: first, that when one had “arrived” in a city such as San Francisco, there was hardly any place to go, and second, that as far as New York was concerned, Californians might be rich but they had no class. An invitation to Ned Greenway’s cotillion might mark the capstone to a social career in San Francisco, but it meant nothing to Mrs. Astor, whose doors remained closed to Californians. Once again Californians looked abjectly to the East for inspiration and instruction on how to glide out of the cocoon of San Francisco and into the glittering world of the international butterflies.
One thing was quite clear about Caroline Astor: she loved titles. A count, archduke, prince, or earl immediately found himself invited to her house. Even an undistinguished British baronet was included in her original list of four hundred by virtue of the fact that his name was Sir Roderick Cameron. If Californians could acquire titles through marriage, then perhaps they could be accepted, not only in Europe, where, if the Mackays were an example, it was easy, but, so much more important, in the East.
The American vogue of exchanging American-made fortunes for European coronets is sometimes said to have started with Jennie Jerome, the daughter of a New York stockbroker, who married Lord Randolph Churchill in 1874, but actually this sort of thing had been going on for some time on the East Coast. In 1798, Anna Louise Bingham, the daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia merchant, married Alexander Baring, later to become Lord Ashburton. A few years later her sister Maria, not to be outdone, eloped at the age of fifteen and married the Count de Tilly. In 1824, Elizabeth Astor (daughter of the first John Jacob) had married Count Vincent Rumpff. Following Jennie Jerome’s example, a number of other American heiresses had made titled marriages. Consuelo Vanderbilt married the Duke of Marlborough; Jay Gould’s daughter Anna married, first, Count Paul Ernest Boniface de Castellane and, second, the count’s cousin, the Due de Talleyrand-Périgord. Alice Thaw of Pittsburgh married the Earl of Yarmouth. True, not many of these marriages worked out very happily for the women involved, and in nearly every case they cost the women—or their parents—considerable sums of money.
It was clear that East Coast women of noble rank outweighed those of the West Coast, and California was determined to catch up. By contrast, the social scene in San Francisco did seem a little primitive. For the debut of John D. Spreckels’ daughters, Grace and Lillie, in 1899, the party was held at the Native Sons’ Hall. Five hundred and fifty guests danced to the strains of Rosner’s Hungarian Orchestra, which was hidden behind a bank of palms and ferns. In 1905, in the announcement of Grace Spreckels’ engagement to Alexander Hamilton—no kin to the American Revolutionary statesman but a member of the family that owned the Baker & Hamilton Hardware Store—it was noted that the bride-to-be had “mastered the art of safely and successfully driving an automobile.”
The first San Francisco woman to outfit herself with a foreign title was not, as it turned out, a member of one of the Big Four families or even a member of Eleanor Martin’s set. She was none other than Flora Sharon, Will Sharon’s daughter, whose father now owned the Palace Hotel. An aging Briton named Sir Thomas George Fermor-Hesketh had arrived in San Francisco aboard his yacht, the Lancashire Witch, had checked into the Palace, and, according to the story, had spotted Flora Sharon in an elevator. Sir Thomas made inquiries, and when the Lancashire Witch departed for England, Flora was Lady Hesketh, wife of the seventh baronet of Lancaster. Before the marriage William Sharon had settled a dowry of five million dollars on Flora. The year was 1880, and San Francisco saw how easily titles were acquired. One just bought them.
In the years that followed Flora Sharon’s triumph San Francisco went on a regular title-shopping spree, going about it—in typical California fashion—with cheerful abandon, with money no object, throwing caution to the winds. Eleanor Martin’s sister, Anna Donahue, decided that her daughter Mary Ellen needed a title and set about interviewing likely bachelors from the Almanach de Gotha. In 1883, Mrs. Donahue settled on the Prussian Baron Heinrich von Schroeder. At this point the Crockers, not to be upstaged, arranged for Mrs. Crocker’s sister, Beth Sperry, of the little river town of Stockton, to become the Princess Poniatowski, wife of a prince who claimed descent from the kings of Poland. Clara Huntington, Collis Huntington’s adopted daughter, and John Mackay’s daughter, Eva, were friends—on the surface at least. When it came to men they were fiercely competitive. Both now wanted titles, and their mothers agreed that they should have them, though John Mackay was far from enthusiastic about the whole title-hunting craze. For a while the two young women were in a neck-and-neck position to capture the prize of Prince von Hatzfeld-Wildenberg. Clara Huntington got him in 1889, for a reported price of five million dollars, which seemed to have become the going rate. Eva Mackay was next reported engaged to Philippe de Bourbon, but this rumor turned out to be false. Eventually it was announced that Eva would marry Prince Fernando Galatro-Colonna of Naples, which she did, and both new princesses agreed that they had come out equally, though Princess Eva ran away from her prince eight years later and never returned.
Perhaps the most astonishing California success story of the kind concerned Maud Burke of San Francisco. Tiny and plain, with an enormous nose and mouse-colored hair, and, according to a contemporary report, a fondness for wearing “more maquillage than her poor, pointed face could bear,” she was nonetheless extraordinarily ambitious. Having failed socially in both her native city and New York, she followed the Mackay example and tried London, backed financially by a wealthy uncle. Here, having changed her name from Maud—which she had always hated—to Emerald, she became enormously popular. Despite her appearance she had discovered that all-important key to social success—a kind of perpetual motion. She was so intensely animated that she could not be overlooked in any gathering, and her rapid-fire, almost nonstop manner of speaking—coupled with a fine mastery of the art of gossip—quickly earned her a reputation as a wit. No lexicon of the bons mots of Emerald Burke survives her, nor is it likely that one will be compiled, because nothing she said was really funny. The secret was in her delivery.
Unlike her California sisters who had to pay for their titles, Emerald found one, in the elderly sportsman Sir Bache Cunard (of the steamship-company Cunards), who was not only a peer of the realm but also an extremely rich man. As the fabled Lady Emerald Cunard she became, over the next forty years, one of the dominant social forces in England and one of London’s most powerful and popular hostesses. In the early 1930s she was a pivotal figure in “the Prince of Wales set” and was one of the principals in the heady swirl of events surrounding the prince’s romance with Mrs. Wallis Warfield Spencer Simpson. Following Edward VIII’s abdication, most of his former set quickly turned their backs on him and transferred their allegiance to the new monarch and his wife. But Emerald Cunard’s position was more secure. In fact, the new queen is supposed to have said, shortly after George VI’s succession to the throne, that she was afraid she and her husband would never be included in any of Emerald Cunard’s entertainments. “You see,” she said, “Emerald has so often said that Bertie and I are not fashionable.”
In San Francisco all these marital developments drew a mixed reaction from the press. On the one hand, the titled marriages were always fully reported with as much enthusiastic detail as might be used to describe a great American victory in a major war. But some sour notes were sounded too. From his society-gossip columnist’s desk at Hearst’s Examiner the irascible William Chambliss was particularly acid. To Chambliss, these marriages to “foreigners” represented a grave economic threat to the state of California, if not to the entire country. He saw good red-blooded American money being leaked out of the country in which it had been made. He wrote:
A complete list of all the marriages of American women to titled men, for the past thirty-five years, shows that at least two hundred million dollars have gone away from this country in that period.… California has had more than her share to bear. Seven California girls have taken away from this state alone nearly twenty millions of dollars, or ten per cent of the entire amount, in exchange for seven titles, most of which are both shabby and shop worn.
Prince Colonna has probably cost, up to date, in the neighborhood of five million dollars. Prince Hatzfedt [sic] an equal if not larger sum. Prince Poniatowski came cheaper: a quarter of a million was about his price. Viscount Deerhurst and Lord Hesketh cost in the neighborhood of two and five million dollars respectively. The dot of Lord Wolesley’s California bride was probably something under a million, but with moderate luck Sir Bache Cunard will get some two millions of old man Carpentier’s accumulation of dollars, as his bride, Miss Burke, is the Outland Capitalist’s favorite niece and should come in for a large slice of his estate.
At the time the above was written the granddaughter of Darius Ogden Mills (the director of the Bank of California who had carried the bad news to William Ralston) had not yet married the Earl of Granard. Had that happened sooner, Chambliss would doubtless have accused Californians of contributing an even larger share of cash to the European money drain.
And yet the infusion of aristocratic European blood into the roughhewn stock of the California pioneers may have had at least one desired and desirable effect. It may have helped Californians acquire, or at least make them aware of, such Old World qualities as gentility and taste. It may have helped them appreciate quiet understatement, whereas before that the California rich had relied primarily on garish ostentation and flashy shows to make it clear that they had money. The 1880 wedding of Flora Sharon to Sir Thomas Fermor-Hesketh was a glaring example of the latter. Held at Belmont, the huge white palace near San Mateo inherited by the bride’s father, it took place in the inevitable music room, 70 feet long and 24 feet wide, lined with floor-to-ceiling mirrors and lighted by three thirty-branch crystal chandeliers in an attempt to put the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles into the shadows. The Sharon house, which, like the hotel, had once belonged to William Ralston, contained other interesting features. It had an even one hundred bedrooms. All the doorknobs were of sterling silver. In Ralston’s day he had loved pointing out to his guests the features of the house, such as the clever device that opened the main gates. When one approached the house, across a short bridge, the weight of the carriage on the bridge triggered a mechanism that swung open the heavy iron gates into the big entrance courtyard. All of this, along with the furnishings, now belonged to the Sharons.
One hundred and fifty guests had been invited to the ceremony, and eight hundred more to the reception following it, and preparations had been made to handle thousands of the general and curious public who were expected to line the drives and fill the lawns of the estate for a glimpse of the proceedings.
The weather was terrible. “The winds whistled through the little valley,” the Examiner wrote. “The swiftly falling rain was blown in slanting sheets against the windows of the mansion and along the wide, hard driveway to the village. In the shadow of the hills the great trees quivered and shed their load of vaporous surcharge.” Notwithstanding the rain, and whatever the vaporous surcharge was that was coming from the trees, throngs of people showed up. Two special trains had been engaged to carry the guests to Belmont from San Francisco. At the San Francisco station a woman guest, magnificently dressed in white silk from head to toe, tried to jump from the running board of her carriage to the curb and landed on her hands and knees in a pool of mud. Before the press could identify her she had climbed back into her carriage shouting unprintable words. At the Belmont railroad station forty carriages stood in readiness to convey the guests to the house. When the trains arrived at Belmont, there was a mad and furious rush for seats in the carriages, with much pushing and shoving. In the confusion one woman guest was pushed through some trestlework and landed in a gravel pit six feet below.
The Sharon house had been overpowered with decorations for the occasion. As the Examiner described it: “How profuse were the decorations may be inferred when it is stated that all the rarest plants of the greeneries, covering more than a city block in extent, had been gracefully disposed and festooned round the rooms. Every pillar of the many in the house was invisible for the smilax and camellias with which they had been covered. Boxes of evergreens, hanging baskets of shrubs and cut flowers had been again gracefully disposed in all the rooms.”
The Examiner then filled two more columns of breathless print with what the guests ate, and still more with the wedding presents, one of which was a painting by Humphrey Moore: “Entitled ‘El Bolero,’ it represents a scene in a room of the Alhambra; a lover, whilst playing the guitar, is at the same time gazing with pleased admiration upon a beautiful animated creature in the graceful attitude of the dance. To place this inspiration upon canvas required but the work of three days, very wonderful proof of the eminent artist’s dexterity.”
In striking contrast, a generation later, was the 1909 celebration of another of San Francisco’s intramural marriages. Flora Sharon’s brother Fred, who had been an usher at the Sharon-Hesketh wedding, had married Mrs. Witherspoon Breckinridge, who had been a Tevis, the daughter of San Francisco’s Lloyd Tevis. Thus Fred Sharon became the stepfather of Miss Flora Louise Breckinridge. Flora Louise was now marrying the elder son of Sir Thomas and Lady Flora Hesketh, thus joining in wedlock Lady Flora’s son and her stepniece. The wedding took place in Paris and was attended only by the bride’s mother and stepfather, the groom’s parents, and a small handful of Tevis relatives.
San Francisco’s rich seemed finally to be learning how to relax with their money.