End of the Battle
Alma Spreckels, who loved her children in an abstract way and enjoyed visiting with them when there was time between meetings and appointments for her various museum projects, made periodic efforts to be on good terms with them, particularly the two girls. But these were never really successful. For too many years the children had resented their mother’s outside-the-home preoccupations, which had left them in the care of governesses and nurses and other servants until they were old enough to fend for themselves. Little Alma’s youthful elopement and marriage to John N. Rosekrans had been interpreted as an act of filial defiance, and of course the marriage did not last long. Late in life Big Alma decided to divide her Washington Street house into three large apartments so that her daughters could live with her. At least that was what she had in mind. She gave the top-floor apartment, with its ceiling of Tiffany glass, to her daughter Dorothy, but Dorothy rarely came to San Francisco to use it. The second, or “parlor,” floor was for Mrs. Spreckels herself, and the ground floor was intended for Little Alma.
But Alma had no interest in living beneath her mother. She was involved in building her own huge modern house on Broadway, all decorated in black and white (the only colors that Little Alma—a tall, fair woman—ever wore), which had its own indoor swimming pool, among other amenities. So Big Alma offered the ground floor to the young man who had become her favorite grandson, Little Alma’s son, John Rosekrans, Jr. Rosekrans was equally fond of his grandmother, whom he called “Gangy,” and the span of another generation helped him appreciate her imperious manner and outspoken tongue that seemed only to startle strangers. Rosekrans’ first wedding, for example, had been a garden affair, and Mrs. Spreckels’ two daughters had been horrified to see their large mother take her seat in a gilt ballroom chair and drive its legs deep into the ground. It took two sturdy ushers to pull the chair out, while Mrs. Spreckels stood by muttering earthy expletives. Rosekrans had thought the whole episode quite funny. But about sharing the big house with his grandmother he had a few reservations. He was then in the process of getting a divorce, and he wondered how his grandmother might feel about the occasional lady friends who might visit him. “Don’t think a thing about it, pet,” she said. “Listen, you only live once, and when you’re dead you’re dead a long time. Your grandfather had a mistress, and when she died they turned her house into a mortuary. You do whatever you want.” And so Rosekrans took the big apartment, which had at least sixteen rooms, for which his grandmother charged him a token rent of a hundred dollars a month.
She didn’t snoop on him exactly, but she did like to pop in on him, usually unannounced. On emerging from her bath in the morning, at least one young woman who had spent the night was startled to see a tall, stout, elderly woman pottering about the apartment in bedroom slippers and a pink nightgown, helping John set up for a party he was planning that evening. “My God,” bellowed Mrs. Spreckels, “who the hell are you?” Such encounters became rather common.
Even after her son, the much-married Adolph, who had been such a trial to her in his lifetime, had died, she remained loyal to his memory. Kay Spreckels Gable, his sixth and last wife, was suing the estate and asking to be a trustee on behalf of her Spreckels children. “No!” cried Mrs. Spreckels. “She’s a bitch! Don’t give her anything!” And to make sure he knew how she felt on the matter, she began making daily telephone calls to the judge who was weighing the case. Her lawyer, Mr. Bradley, who was also an officer in the trust, begged her to stop making these telephone calls, which were only damaging the family’s position. She refused, snorting, “What does Bradley know?”
In later years she led a somewhat peripatetic existence, seeming to weary of the ongoing battle between her museum and the de Young Museum. She had never, of course, been really accepted by San Francisco society, which had become more or less dominated by the de Young sisters—an irony, considering the fact that their father had been one of the most dreaded and disliked men in town. At one point Mrs. Spreckels bought a house in Neuilly, outside Paris, and for a while had an idea of living permanently there. She also kept an apartment in New York at 1020 Fifth Avenue, where she sometimes spent her winters. But in the end she always came back to San Francisco, where, she liked to reminisce, she used to walk two miles to school to save the nickel streetcar fare.
Aside from her grandson, her favorite companion was probably Thomas Howe, the director of her museum, although she always was careful to address him formally as “Mr. Howe,” and he in turn always addressed her as “Mrs. Spreckels.” Her daughters clearly resented her relationship with him. (“She doesn’t call you ‘Mr. Howe’ behind your back,” one of her daughters snipped to him.) The two often traveled together to New York, to visit the art auction houses and the galleries—Findlay’s, Knoedler’s, and Duveen’s—along Fifty-seventh Street. They traveled to Washington to visit the National Gallery, and on one of these visits Mrs. Spreckels expressed a wish to see Colonial Williamsburg. She could be miserly, and though accustomed to being driven around San Francisco in a Rolls-Royce by a chauffeur, she decreed that the trip to Williamsburg be made in a rented drive-yourself car, which Mr. Howe would drive.
Arriving at Williamsburg, they checked in at the inn, and were asked how long they intended to stay. “Oh, about a week,” said Mrs. Spreckels. But by four o’clock that afternoon she had grown restless. “Mr. Howe, haven’t we pretty much seen everything?” she complained. “Let’s go back to New York.” So they checked out of the inn and flew back to New York from Richmond. In New York she was soon restless again and wanted to go home to San Francisco, though Howe had museum business to conduct in New York and needed to remain a few more days. “How much money do you think you’ll need?” she asked. Howe mentioned a modest figure—the year was 1940 and New York had not become an expensive place—and, somewhat grudgingly, Mrs. Spreckels peeled off a few hundred-dollar bills from the large roll she carried with her when she traveled. Three days later Howe was back in San Francisco, and he presented himself at Washington Street to deliver an accounting of his expenses. She received him, as usual, in her bedroom. Just back from a shopping trip, she tossed her large flowered hat onto one of the swan-headposts of her extraordinary bed (“A king made love in it, of course”) and nonchalantly wriggled out of her girdle and stockings. Howe explained that he had about three hundred dollars left over. “Do me a favor,” she said. “Put it into something for little Primrose.” Primrose was Howe’s young daughter. So she could be generous too—just as she could cause acute embarrassment to her friends. Once, at a dinner party where her guest of honor was Pierre Monteux, the celebrated conductor of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, Mrs. Spreckels boomed out, “You know, Mr. Monteux, Mr. Howe plays the piano!” Tommy Howe was then forced to go to the piano and deliver an awkward rendition of “Limehouse Blues.”
Still, Tommy Howe was devoted to her. “She was a kind of Fafnir character, out of Wagner,” he says. “People didn’t always agree with her, and people didn’t always like her. Her two daughters hated her heartily. But better than anybody I’ve ever known, she had the ability to sense the fundamental qualities in people, and cut through sham and pretense.” Howe never made any pretense, either, of the low esteem in which he held the daughters. “Neither of them ever did anything for their mother’s museum. We were raising money for some awards once, and I went to Dorothy and asked her for a contribution of two hundred dollars. She said she could only afford a hundred dollars. Practically in the next breath she was talking about an expensive necklace she wanted to buy. It was Dorothy too who once sent a hasty note to her mother from Palm Beach, enclosing a photograph of herself sitting next to the Duke of Windsor at a dinner party. “Look who I’m sitting with!” wrote the granddaughter of a man who had once won a large part of the kingdom of Hawaii in a poker game. Her mother wrote back, saying, “I give up. Who is it?”
Tommy Howe remained loyal to Mrs. Spreckels even after Little Adolph died and Mrs. Spreckels began to be more and more of a recluse—even after the time had come when Howe would arrive at Mrs. Spreckels’ house to deliver copies of the latest museum catalogues and she would no longer want to see him. Her grandson, John, had been remarried—to a woman, fortunately, whom Mrs. Spreckels liked—and had moved into a house of his own, and John and Dodie Rosekrans were among the very few people whom Gangy asked to see. In 1964 she fell and injured her back. Later that year she had another fall and broke her hip. She recovered from that, but six months later she came down with pneumonia, and died at the age of eighty-three.
Immediately her two daughters fell to wrangling over the funeral services. Dorothy wanted the private family services at her house, and Alma wanted them at hers. Finally, when it was pointed out by the directors of N. Grey & Company, San Francisco’s fashionable undertaking establishment, that the platinum-plated casket that Dorothy had insisted upon would not fit through the doors, Dorothy relented, and the services were held at Little Alma’s huge black-and-white modern house (six years in the building; Alma had not wanted her mother to see it until every last black-and-white detail was finished). The service was small, just for family and close friends, and Mrs. Spreckels reposed in the huge casket wearing a black dress, her famous pair of sunburst diamond clips, and some other stones. Tommy Howe read “When Earth’s Last Picture Is Painted,” and Dorothy Spreckels Munn whispered to him, “Doesn’t she look sweet? Of course I’ll take the jewels off before they close the coffin.”
The public funeral the next day was something else again. It was held in the huge rotunda of the Palace of the Legion of Honor, in the center of which Mrs. Spreckels lay in state. It started at ten in the morning, and long before that hour the rotunda and the rooms and grounds beyond had filled with more than ten thousand people—friends, enemies, public officials, the press and television, and merely curious San Franciscans who wanted a glimpse of the legendary old lady who had lived alone in the block-long “Sugar Palace” in Pacific Heights. Just before the services were about to start a tour bus pulled up in front of the museum and disgorged a full load of out-of-town art lovers, who were quite unaware of what was going on. As the tourists entered the museum, noticing that the center of attention was obviously the platinum-plated casket, the tour guide announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, this is a wax effigy of the museum’s founder, the late Mrs. Alma de Bretteville Spreckels.” Immediately a museum guard stepped over to him and hissed, “That is not an effigy. That is Alma de Bretteville Spreckels.” It was a moment Alma Spreckels might have enjoyed.
The moment the services were over, Dorothy Munn cornered Tommy Howe to say, “Quick, come with me to the mausoleum. We’ve got to get the jewels off before they close the casket!” Howe accompanied her to the mausoleum, where the clips, rings, and necklaces were quickly removed from the earthly remains of Dorothy’s mother. Then the casket was closed and sealed.
It had long been the hope of San Franciscans that the resources, revenues, and collections of the two battling museums could somehow be combined into one museum of art. But even though Mrs. Spreckels was gone, the de Young sisters continued vigorously to oppose a merger. More people would have to die before this could be accomplished, and the final opponent, Helen de Young Cameron, did not die until the early 1970s. With that the two museums finally agreed to join hands and marry. But even then the de Youngs seemed to have come out on top. When the new, combined museum, consolidated under a single director, Ian McKibbin White, became a reality at last in 1972, the de Youngs managed to get top billing on the letterhead, which read:
THE FINE ARTS
MUSEUMS OF
SAN FRANCISCO
M. H. de Young
Memorial
Museum
California
Palace of the
Legion of Honor
Of course one of the peculiar things about the de Young sisters, when all four were alive, was that they all actually seemed to like one another. That was unusual in San Francisco. More common were the Spreckels sisters, who, with their mother gone, now had only each other to quarrel with. Among other money-related issues was the question of which woman would control 2080 Washington Street—the enormous wedding-cake house in which even the servants’ rooms had wall-to-wall carpeting, the house with its $30,000 French commodes, its $25,000 motor-operated movable glass swimming-pool enclosure and built-in radiant-heating system, and everything else, almost literally, that money could buy.