Mother and Children
Alma Spreckels seemed to thrive on building museums. In addition to the Palace of the Legion of Honor, she built the Maryhill Museum in the state of Washington and contributed a large collection to it. She next built the San Francisco Maritime Museum and gave it a collection. At the time of her death, even though she cared little for music, she was working on assembling a collection devoted to the dance and theater, which was to form the nucleus of yet a fourth museum.
Alma Spreckels always became deeply and personally involved with all her projects. While developing her Maritime Museum, for example, she heard of a retired seaman who built ship models. She found him, appropriately enough, in a waterfront bar; they became friends, and she spent many afternoons in the bar with him while he whittled. When he died, Mrs. Spreckels went to his funeral, where she met his widow, and offered to pay for the burial. The widow demurred, but Mrs. Spreckels thrust a wad of bills into her hand anyway. Then she went back to the old sailor’s favorite saloon haunt and bought drinks all around.
During World War II she was a virtual dynamo. The cavernous garages of her Washington Street house were turned into a salvage shop, which she ran for the benefit of at least five different causes and which, among other things, raised over $170,000 for the Red Cross. When the Nazis overran Denmark, Alma Spreckels organized an appeal to the people of San Francisco and raised millions of dollars for medical supplies and relief funds. During the war her doctor, William Lister (Lefty) Rogers, was a naval medical officer, and at one point, when his ship was in port in San Francisco, Rogers complained to her of the ship’s lack of much needed surgical supplies. Immediately Mrs. Spreckels ordered the required equipment. It had not arrived by the time Rogers’s ship was due to depart, but it did arrive a few hours afterward. Mrs. Spreckels dispatched a speedboat to catch up with the navy battleship in the Pacific and deliver the equipment.
Throughout the war Mrs. Spreckels and her San Francisco League for Service Men entertained San Francisco-based servicemen and their wives. She furnished every service wife with an electric washing machine from what was apparently an inexhaustible supply. To the servicemen she gave thousands of footballs, baseball bats, and radios. She also provided musical instruments for no less than one hundred and seventy-six military bands. Still, her primary interest remained art and artists. During the First World War, for example, she became interested in an impoverished sculptor named Putnam. Through a friend Mrs. Spreckels arranged to have Putnam’s sculptures shipped to France to be cast—despite the U-boats.
She was not, for all her philanthropy, a very practical woman. The mainstay of her fortune was a trust amounting to about $10,000,000, which had been created for her by her husband and from which she received an income of about $750,000 a year. (“Remember, pet, I’m in trust!” she would warn people who came to her for contributions.) She frequently overspent her income and was forever borrowing from banks to make ends meet. Once her trustees came to her and suggested that the trust sell a certain stock in which it had a strong position. Mrs. Spreckels opposed selling the stock, but the trustees outvoted her. She thereupon bought up the stock in question with her own money. It went down. She often seemed to have only a vague idea of the value of things. Accompanying her for a drive in her car one day, a friend commented on a pin Mrs. Spreckels was wearing, saying, “My dear, what beautiful jade!” Mrs. Spreckels studied the pin as though she had never seen it before and finally said, “God damn it, those are emeralds!” She did indeed have quite a large collection of jade pieces, and once, at a party, a guest in a festive mood slipped into his pocket a jade carving displayed on a table, thinking that this would be a great joke. Typically, the hostess never noticed the missing object, and, the next morning, thinking better of his prank, the guest returned the jade piece to her in the center of a flower arrangement. Mrs. Spreckels gave the flowers a cursory glance and sent the arrangement off to a local hospital. A few days later she received a letter of thanks from the hospital, acknowledging the flowers and “particularly the exquisite jade carving which, we have determined, may bring in excess of ten thousand dollars.”
On her ranch in the Napa Valley she was equally casual. As a special gift, one of her house guests gave Mrs. Spreckels a pair of prize laying hens. Her cook prepared them for Sunday dinner. When motoring on the Peninsula, Mrs. Spreckels was fond of stopping at a favorite French restaurant called L’Omelette near Palo Alto. She and her party were always given front-and-center treatment at L’Omelette, where, sweeping in through ranks of bowing waiters and captains, she was always placed at a special table. One night, however, a Thursday, Mrs. Spreckels and a guest arrived—as usual, unannounced—to find the restaurant filled to capacity, with a long waiting line for tables. Spotting her immediately—which was easy to do because of her height—the headwaiter hurried over to her with apologies, “I’m terribly sorry, Mrs. Spreckels, but it’s Thursday—cooks’ night out.” Mrs. Spreckels looked confused. “Do you mean,” she said, “that all these people are cooks?”
Like many rich people who enjoy being philanthropic, Mrs. Spreckels did not enjoy being asked for money outright. No one knew this better than her Legion of Honor curator, Thomas Howe. But when the staff of the Legion was organizing a baseball team, it found itself fifty dollars short of the amount needed to buy uniforms. The team, wondering whether the Legion’s wealthy benefactress might be willing to make the needed contribution, approached Mr. Howe. Howe, who had never asked Mrs. Spreckels for money before, had misgivings, but he knew that Mrs. Spreckels herself was a baseball fan, and the amount was small. He brought the matter up with her at one of their regular meetings, explaining that the team intended to call itself the Adolph B. Spreckels Memorial Baseball Team. Mrs. Spreckels nodded approvingly. Then Howe brought up the matter of the fifty dollars. “What!” cried Mrs. Spreckels. She flung open her reticule and poured its contents—lipstick, emery boards, matches, a few coins, a handkerchief—onto the table. “Where do you expect me to get fifty dollars?” she cried. “My God, you people have got my skin. Now you want my guts.”
It was not that she neglected her children exactly. Like many children of rich parents who were not born wealthy, the Spreckels children were spoiled unmercifully, pampered and fussed over by nurses, governesses and servants. Their mother showered them with costly toys and gifts. She gave her daughter Dorothy a coming-out party unlike anything San Francisco had seen since Flora Sharon’s wedding to Lord Hesketh. “Nubians” in gold turbans and loincloths lined the marble staircase of the Spreckels house. Inside, where the debutante’s mother had kicked off her shoes and curled up on one of her French sofas with her familiar pitcher of martinis to watch the fun, huge mounds of caviar reposed in ice-sculptured bowls and champagne bubbled out of fountains. The party was so splendid that social San Francisco forgot all its newly acquired good manners and reverted to the claim-jumping days. A number of guests were seen leaving the party carrying dripping bowls of caviar. At the time—coming as it did in the darkest days of the Great Depression—Dorothy Spreckels’ coming-out party was sharply criticized in the press (particularly in the ever hostile Chronicle) for its lavishness and ostentation. In reply to the critics Alma Spreckels took the familiar, if somewhat lame, rich person’s line and pointed out that the party provided employment for caterers, waiters, florists, dressmakers, the orchestra, et cetera.
Her one son, Adolph B. Spreckels, Jr.—“Little Adolph,” as he was called—had early displayed certain personality traits that a discerning parent might have found disturbing. He had a sadistic bent and seemed to enjoy torturing small animals and other children. As a young boy he had been given, of all things, a home tattooing kit, and he made a game of chasing his young cousins—particularly timid cousin Wayne—through the house with his ink and needles, trying to pin them down and implant tattoos on their bodies. He had to be carefully watched in the presence of his little nephew John. Adolph had been discovered one day carrying the younger boy by his heels up and down a staircase, pounding little John’s head on the stair treads as he went.
Alma Spreckels’ older daughter, “Little Alma,” would have had an extravagant coming-out party too, but much to her mother’s displeasure, she ran away in her teens and got married. The marriage did not last long. In fact, the three Spreckels children were married a grand total of twelve times and had eleven divorces. (In southern California the John Spreckels line in the same generation was not doing much better, with eight divorces.) Leading the family in the marriage sweepstakes was Little Adolph, who had matured into a not very pleasant young man, whose “mean streak,” as it was called, had grown more pronounced. Adolph had six wives—or, by some counts, seven, although the seventh, with whom he was living at the time of his death, was one he had never bothered to marry. His third wife was his cousin, Geraldine Spreckels. His sixth wife, Kay Williams, was the most famous, because, after divorcing Adolph, she married Clark Gable.
Adolph had become an alcoholic, and at one point during his brief, stormy marriage to Kay he struck her on the head with a Scotch bottle. She charged him with assault, and he was arrested and sent to jail in Los Angeles, where he showed that he could be a gentleman. When he was released, shortly before Christmas, he sent Christmas gifts to all his fellow prisoners.
Little Adolph had a sense of humor—of sorts. During World War II he kept a photograph of Hitler on his desk, which he had inscribed “To Adolph from Adolph.” Following his first marriage, he invited a large group of family and friends to a luncheon at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, where the bride and groom were staying. Guests arrived to find the streets outside the hotel swarming with police cars and fire trucks. Adolph, it seemed, had constructed a lifelike dummy out of pillows and bedclothes, dressed it in a man’s pajamas, and had tossed the “suicide” out the window. On a later occasion Adolph was thrown in jail again, on a disorderly conduct charge, this time in San Francisco. It had something to do with an altercation he had had with a taxicab driver whom Adolph had kept waiting an inordinate amount of time outside a bar and had then refused to pay. At the time, a well known local madam was on trial on prostitution charges. When Adolph was released from jail, reporters asked the scion of the Spreckels fortune what he was doing in town. “I am here to give moral support to my favorite madam,” he replied. When the reporters asked if they could take his picture, Adolph declared, “No photographs until the people from the Daily Worker come.” He was then asked how he would compare the San Francisco jail with that of Los Angeles. “No comparison—San Francisco’s is by far the better jail,” he said.
To be sure, the Spreckels children’s mother may not have set them the most perfect example in regard to marriage. In 1936, twelve years after her husband’s death and while her children were still in their twenties, Alma de Bretteville Spreckels, after an evening of partying, ran off to Reno with a ranch hand named Elmer Awl and married him. She was then fifty-five and he was some ten years younger. San Francisco society was stunned. No one had ever heard of Elmer Awl. “How does he spell his name?” a society editor wanted to know, to which someone is said to have replied, “A-w-1, as in the tool used for punching holes in old leather.” For a while Elmer Awl cut a striking figure in San Francisco society. On opening nights of the opera Mr. Awl appeared in white tie and tails, to which he added white high-heeled boots and a huge white ten-gallon hat. The new Mrs. Awl had meanwhile brought one of her poor relations from Denmark to California, a young niece named Ula. It was not long before it became apparent that Elmer Awl was more interested in Ula than in Alma. Alma and Elmer were divorced, and Elmer married Ula and moved to Santa Barbara. Alma resumed her marriage name of Spreckels.
After divorcing John Rosekrans, the man with whom she eloped, Little Alma Spreckels married James V. Coleman, a descendant of William O’Brien, the silver king. After divorcing Coleman she married Charles Hammel—and this union was to prove even more disastrous than the others. Hammel, a former merchant marine captain, was fond of sailing, and so Little Alma bought him—for $89,000—a forty-foot sloop-rigged motor-sailing yacht called the Berylline. Though Little Alma was a tournament bridge player and an expert horsewoman, she knew nothing at all about boats. Still, saying, “I believe in God and I believe in Charlie,” she set out with her new husband in 1970—with no crew other than themselves—to cruise from San Francisco to Hawaii, with a freezer full of food.
On the second day out the Berylline headed into a storm with twenty-five-foot waves and fifty-mile-an-hour winds. First the freezer snapped a retaining pin and began to crash around alarmingly in the galley. Next, a broken bolt in the generator knocked out the entire electric system, including the motor needed for steering lights, radio communication, the toilets, and, of course, the freezer. The wheel chain broke repeatedly, making steering impossible, and new leaks in the hull appeared daily. The storm was followed by breathless doldrums, which were restful but of little use to a sailboat without a motor. At home in San Francisco it was reported that the Hammels had been lost at sea, but they were merely battling more storms and leaks. At one point Little Alma was thrown from a seat in the galley. She was knocked in the head at least five times. All the spoiled food in the freezer had to be thrown overboard, and eventually the only thing operating aboard the Berylline was a flashlight.
Somehow the pair made it to Hawaii, where they found themselves in Alenuihaha Channel, between the islands of Hawaii and Maui, notorious for treacherous weather and tides. Here the rudder chain broke, and the Berylline drifted inexorably toward the rocks. Finally the boat’s distress flag was spotted and rescue came. The Berylline was towed into the harbor of Kawaihae after twenty-nine days at sea.
The Hammels managed to get home from this excursion, but early in 1972 both Captain Hammel and the Berylline disappeared, leaving Mrs. Hammel quite at a loss for an explanation. At one point Hammel and the yacht were reported to have been seen in Mexico, but then they disappeared again, supposedly for South America. By March, Alma Hammel had engaged a group of international lawyers to issue a barrage of lawsuits, injunctions, and restraining orders, not only to return Captain Hammel to his wife but also to return her yacht. The yacht had been registered in both their names, but, said Alma in her complaint, “At no time did I in any way indicate other than by joint name registration that the boat was his. At no time did I authorize him to take the boat from the Bay Area.” She also added: “On recent occasions Mr. Hammel exhibited a tendency to violence as well as irrational behavior.” A receiver was authorized by the court to return the sloop to its home port. Alma also sued Captain Hammel for divorce, asking only for the Berylline in settlement. She got the divorce and, eventually, the boat. After playing hide-and-seek with it for five months, Hammel finally surrendered it to her in Ensenada. Alma then asked the court to restore her maiden name of Spreckels.
Little Alma’s sister, Dorothy, married, first, Mr. Jean Dupuy and, second, Mr. Andrew McCarthy. Her third marriage, to Charles Munn—who made millions by inventing the racetrack totalizer (the device that flashes on a board the numbers of the horses, their changing odds before the race, and the results afterward)—is the only one of the twelve marriages of Alma de Bretteville’s children that did not end in divorce, and this must be considered something of an accomplishment. The Munns never set off alone in a yacht, but they did make news of sorts in 1971 when they spent eighteen thousand dollars to charter a Pan Am 707 jetliner to fly them from Paris directly to Palm Beach in order to avoid the “mishmash” of customs and changing planes at Kennedy Airport.
When Pan Am’s publicity people released the news of this record-breaking charter, Mrs. Munn couldn’t understand why so much fuss was being made. “It didn’t cost more than people pay for a Rolls-Royce to charter that plane,” said she. The analogy was a little weak. When one buys a Rolls-Royce, one gets to use it for at least a year or so. When chartering a 707, one does not get to keep the plane. As for Rolls-Royces, it was pointed out that the Munns at the time had four—one in San Francisco, one at their Palm Beach house, and two in Paris, where they maintained an apartment.
When Little Adolph Spreckels died in 1968—he fell in a hotel in Arizona and fractured his skull—his mother took his death very hard. Though all of her children had given her heartaches, and Adolph more than the rest, the death of her only son seemed to devastate her. Her famous energy seemed suddenly to desert her, and she became a virtual recluse in her Washington Street house. Sometimes at night, after the Palace of the Legion of Honor had closed, she would ask her chauffeur to drive her out to it. She would stand in the dark park and look at it for a while, then get back in her car and be driven home. She saw few of her old friends, and when her daughters came to see her, there were inevitably quarrels. From time to time she would try to ease the bitterness between herself and her children—all of whom she felt had led utterly wasted lives—with great conciliatory bursts of generosity. Once, after a visit with her daughter Alma that had gone reasonably well, Mrs. Spreckels called out to Alma, who was going out the door, “Need any furniture, pet?” Alma stepped back into the room and mentioned a commode of her mother’s that she had always admired. “Take it!” cried Mrs. Spreckels. Alma replied that she would see about getting a mover in the morning. “No, take it now!” insisted Mrs. Spreckels. “You can put it in the back of Jimmy Coleman’s car.” Alma replied that this was hardly practical; it was too valuable a piece not to be moved by experts, and besides, they had no movers’ blankets. “Take some blankets off my bed!” said Mrs. Spreckels, and all at once the two women were quarreling again, over a piece of furniture.
Alma and Dorothy Spreckels Munn now own, in joint tenancy, the Washington Street house, that fantastic white-stone sculpture with so many carved garlands and furbelows on its façade that, in the San Francisco sunshine, it glitters like a confection of spun sugar—which, when one remembers where the money to build it came from, perhaps it really is. Was it all worth the candle? It should probably go without saying that the two sisters are now in a bitter legal battle over who will finally possess the house. In the fray for a while was also Kay Spreckels Gable, who claimed a share of the property on behalf of her two children by Little Adolph.
The house is one of the last great turn-of-the-century San Francisco mansions still owned by the family that built it. It is empty much of the year. Little Alma Spreckels has built a large new house for herself in Pacific Heights. The Munns spend their winters in Palm Beach, their springs and autumns in Paris, and visit San Francisco only briefly in between. When they are alone in the house, the watchmen and caretakers report strange night noises and are convinced that there is a ghost. If so, it is doubtless the restless shade of Alma de Bretteville Spreckels, searching for her children.
Her daughter Alma says, “She did a lot of wonderful things for us. But she didn’t really take care of us.”