California Rich Page 7

  * In World War I the Venetia was turned over to the United States Navy and was one of the vessels that helped sink the German U-boat that allegedly had sunk the Lusitania. This feat was immortalized in a windy volume, Venetia—Avenger of the Lusitania.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Chronicle of Power

  In her new book on etiquette that was sweeping the country Emily Post, an easterner through and through, had begun referring to Californians as “the new-rich Westerns.” The new-rich westerners, she implied disdainfully, might be long on money but were short on taste and cultivation. In California this judgment rankled, because, as in everything else the new-rich Californians undertook, their rush to culture was as headlong and haphazard as their rush to gold. Culture was embraced with a reckless abandon, with the result that its early monuments seemed either pathetically insignificant or ridiculously larger than life. It was to establish himself as a man of culture that John D. Spreckels decreed that the music room of his Coronado mansion be the biggest room in the house, occupying an entire wing. (Even his yacht, Venetia, had a music room.) Conceived as a true temple of art, the Spreckels music room was designed to resemble a cathedral choir. Carved mahogany pillars supported its high vaulted ceiling, painted blue and gold, and a gigantic organ and choir filled the apse. The organ’s pipes were sunk in the floor of the basement below and continued upward, so that music emerged through flues concealed in the gilt grillwork that ran about the ceiling twenty feet above. With such an organ it seemed beside the point that neither Mr. Spreckels nor his wife could play. (Years later John D. Spreckels’ granddaughters would argue over whether he played the organ with his hands or used rolls. The answer was rolls.)

  Nor had Mr. Spreckels been remiss when it came to bestowing cultural gifts on the general public. He donated the Coronado Public Library, which for many years was notable for containing far more shelf space than books. He also built the huge Spreckels Theatre in San Diego, designed for stage, symphony, and operatic productions, which, at first, were in short supply. But his most spectacular gift to the city was the $ 100,000 Spreckels Organ in Balboa Park. Placed at the center of a vast colonnaded amphitheater, open to the air and surmounted by an archway somewhat resembling London’s Marble Arch, the pipes of the Spreckels Organ were as tall as forty feet. The organ was dedicated at the opening of the Panama-California Exposition of 1914, of which Mr. Spreckels had been a principal sponsor, and was billed as “the only outdoor organ in America, probably in the world.” Sixty thousand people attended the opening performance, and thereafter one Dr. Humphrey Stewart was engaged to give daily recitals, the sounds of which carried to the distant hills.

  San Francisco meanwhile was not about to be outdone by an upstart city in the south and had early set out to establish itself as the Athens of the West. In 1869, William Ralston—a clerk on a Mississippi steamboat before striking it rich in the Comstock Lode—had opened the California Theatre in San Francisco, and seven years later George S. Baldwin opened a rival theater in his new hotel. The emphasis, however, of both theaters was more on interior decor than on performing art. Mr. Baldwin advertised that when it came to acres of red plush, satin, gilt, and crystal ornamentation, his theater “had no rival, even in art-loving Europe.”

  By the late 1870s the rage of theatergoing England had become Gilbert and Sullivan, and theatergoing San Francisco was determined to have a Gilbert and Sullivan production. Unfortunately, according to San Francisco social historian Frances Moffat, Messrs. Gilbert and Sullivan were unwilling to sell the rights to their works in the United States. Faced with this slight problem, American theatrical entrepreneurs decided simply to pirate Gilbert and Sullivan. On the night that H.M.S. Pinafore opened in London, stenographers were stationed in the audience to take down the dialogue. Other agents were able to bribe musicians in the orchestra pit for a copy of the score. Thus, within days of the London opening, a purloined version of Pinafore was able to open in New York, and on Christmas Eve of 1878 in San Francisco to a packed house. In Pinafore’s journey from East Coast to West, however, someone had forgotten to note that it was a comic operetta, and in San Francisco it was advertised and performed as a high drama of the sea. “A real ship mounted with real sailors!” exclaimed the program. “Real cannon! A realistic production!” Where some of the music had seemed too light and frolicsome, the producers had changed it and inserted new, heavy warlike themes and sea chanteys. San Francisco audiences found the production thoroughly gripping.

  The San Francisco success of Gilbert and Sullivan was not topped until 1887, when the “Divine” Sarah Bernhardt made her California debut at the Baldwin Theatre. The vehicle Bernhardt chose—a baroque melodrama called Fedora—was performed entirely in French, a language few San Franciscans understood, but when the opening-night curtain rang down, the entire audience rose to its feet and began shouting whatever French it knew—“Magnifique!” “Bonjour!” “Au revoir!” “Comment allez-vous!” Frances Moffat, who has had the distinction of reporting society doings for both the Chronicle and the Examiner, tells us that in his review of the performance “The Examiner critic reported that Michael de Young of the Chronicle was madly looking through a French dictionary” for something appropriately French to shout. Hundreds of red roses were tossed on the stage, and the standing ovation continued through seven curtain calls.

  In San Francisco, culture created a kind of umbrella under which the dissident factions of the city’s rich could bury their hatchets and meet to present the appearance of a polite society. Culture called not only for the best clothes and jewels but also for the best manners, and at the theater the warring heirs of Henry Miller, the Nickels and the Bowleses, could briefly forget their bitter legal battles and smile distantly at one another. Culture performed still another interesting function in San Francisco. In a number of American cities culture has been supported—even spawned—by the power of newspapers. But in San Francisco the reverse had happened and a newspaper actually had been created by culture.

  Michael de Young and his brother Charles had been born in St. Louis, the sons of a Dutch Jewish immigrant. In Holland the name had been De Jong, and Michael had been born Meichel. In America the name had become de Young, with determined emphasis on the lower-case d. The de Young brothers had been brought to San Francisco as young boys by their parents in 1850 at the height of the gold rush. The boys’ father had not prospered. Then, in 1865, noticing the enormous popularity of the theater in San Francisco, the de Young brothers decided to publish the Daily Dramatic Chronicle, with theater news and reviews of current plays. The first press run of the Daily Dramatic Chronicle was seven thousand copies, which were distributed free. These were snapped up so quickly that the brothers decided to sell the paper, and editorials and bits of local news were added. Soon the words “Daily” and “Dramatic” were dropped, and the San Francisco Chronicle was on its way to becoming the city’s leading paper.

  The function of the San Francisco Chronicle was to entertain its readers, primarily with local scandals, and its wide circulation was a testament to how well it did its job. When a good scandal could not be turned up locally the Chronicle merely imported one from elsewhere and presented it as though it had happened in San Francisco. Thus a front-page headline that screamed GIRL’S NUDE TORSO FOUND IN VALLEY might reveal, further in the grisly story, that the valley had actually been in New Hampshire. Michael de Young was in charge of the paper’s business end, and Charles de Young was the Chronicle’s principal reporter and editorial writer. Charles’s editorials, in which he attacked political, clerical, and other public figures to the right and to the left, became noted for their vitriol and for the amount of mud that could be slung in the space of a few short paragraphs. “Thief,” “liar,” “scoundrel,” and “rogue” were his favorite epithets, and he flung them about with abandon, to the delight of his readers.

  And, to be sure, there were usually plenty of local San Francisco scandals to keep the pages of the Chronicle filled—quite a number o
f them within the very offices of the Chronicle. In 1880, for example, Charles de Young chose as the object of one of his verbal attacks a Baptist minister named Isaac Kalloch, who was running for mayor of San Francisco. Kalloch retaliated from the pulpit with an even more fiery attack on de Young. De Young, incensed, strapped on his pistol, drove to the Reverend Kalloch’s church, cornered him in the baptistry, and shot him in the leg. De Young spent the night in jail and received a small fine for this misdemeanor. But that was not the end of the affair. Kalloch’s son took matters into his own hands, charged into the office of the Chronicle, took aim at Charles de Young and shot the editor dead. For this murder the younger Kalloch received no punishment. It was considered an act of manly revenge. Even with the onslaught of culture, the spirit of the Wild West died hard in San Francisco.

  Following his brother’s death, Michael de Young took over the editorship of the Chronicle, and his editorials were only slightly less vicious than Charles’s. Michael de Young, however, discovered an even more interesting purpose for his newspaper. It could, he realized, be used as an occasional instrument of blackmail—a use employed very profitably in New York a few years later by “Colonel” William d’Alton Mann in his notorious Town Topics column. If the editor of the Chronicle happened on a juicy bit of news involving a wealthy San Franciscan—a tiny violation of marital fidelity, for example—de Young would offer to print the story—or, for a price, refrain from printing it. In the 1880s William Crocker was building a superlative mansion for himself on Nob Hill at 1919 California Street. The Crockers moved in, and then, barely a month later, moved out in a suspicious hurry. Overnight the Crocker mansion became the de Young mansion, and at the time it was widely assumed that de Young “had something” on Crocker and the house was the price for silence. Such occurrences soon had the effect of making Mike de Young one of the most feared and hated—and powerful—men in the city.

  Not long after the Crocker mansion episode, de Young elected to take on John D. Spreckels’ younger brother, Adolph, and in a series of editorials the Chronicle asserted that Adolph Spreckels was cheating the stockholders of his sugar companies. Furious, Mr. Spreckels decided to emulate the younger Kalloch and marched down to the offices of the Chronicle, where he announced, “Mr. Spreckels is here to shoot Mr. de Young,” and a frightened secretary ushered him in. What happened next is unclear, but by all accounts Mr. Spreckels was a poor shot. According to one story, Spreckels was able to fire one shot, which de Young managed to escape by ducking under his desk. According to another, Spreckels fired bullets all over the room—into the draperies, desk, woodwork, windows, and lamps—before he was finally subdued and dragged away. A third version had de Young firing at least one shot of his own, wounding the attacking Spreckels in the elbow. But whatever the facts, a shooting incident did occur, and it became the basis of a bitter feud between the Spreckels and de Young families that would last for nearly a hundred years—until, in fact, there were no more heirs of Mike de Young or Adolph Spreckels bearing the names de Young or Spreckels.

  Years later Adolph Spreckels’ widow, Alma, by then a leading social power in San Francisco as well as one of the richest women in California, could not be expected to attend any functions that were also attended or sponsored by any de Young. By then, Monday lunch in the Mural Room of the St. Francis Hotel had become a standard society ritual (continued until fairly recent years, when the space occupied by the Mural Room was given over to a dress shop). Ernest, the longtime maître d’hôtel of the Mural Room, used coolly to seat “my ladies,” as he called them, according to their social standing—the best ladies getting the prime tables on either side of the center aisle, and lesser luminaries being placed in Siberia, along the outer edges of the room. Mrs. Spreckels and the de Young sisters, who were no less social powers, were always a special problem for Ernest, who had to make sure that Alma Spreckels and the sisters were seated at some distance apart. The sisters were the four daughters of Michael de Young—Phyllis (Mrs. Nion Tucker), Helen (Mrs. George Cameron), Yvonne (Mrs. Charles Theriot), and Constance (Mrs. Joseph Tobin). All had gone sailing into the earliest editions of the San Francisco Social Register, had made impeccable marriages, and their Jewish heritage (their mother was not Jewish) had been carefully forgotten. Through their mother the sisters had acquired exquisite manners, poise, cultivation, and, though not great beauty, what was considered great charm. Mrs. Spreckels, their social rival, was an imposingly tall, no-nonsense woman who, had she not been so rich, might have been considered vulgar. One never knew what Alma Spreckels might say next, but one thing was certain: she always spoke her mind. Once, in the late 1950s, when leaving the Mural Room, Mrs. Spreckels was obliged to pass by the sisters’ table. In the expectant hush that fell upon the room Mrs. Spreckels—who had a booming voice—was heard to remark to her companion, “You know, those de Young women are nice. But of course we’ve never been intimate since my husband shot their father.”

  For all the violence and bloodshed that spilled around Michael de Young’s untidy life—he was eventually privileged to die a natural death—he seems not to have lost sight of his central mission, to promote culture in San Francisco. By the early 1880s, San Francisco had theater, an opera company, and a fledgling symphony orchestra. Culturally, what did it lack? A museum, of course. In 1885, de Young was instrumental in organizing the San Francisco Mid-Winter Fair—Californians had hit upon the device of staging periodic civic expositions whenever their city’s economy appeared to flag—and it was such a success that de Young suggested that the $75,000 profit from the fair be used to establish a permanent museum in the fair’s Fine Arts Building. This proposal was quickly accepted by the city.

  To be sure, none of de Young’s own money initially went into the museum, but—helped by the Chronicle’s enthusiastic publicizing—the institution quickly became known as the de Young Museum. Nor did de Young do anything personally to dispel the public misconception that the museum was a de Young benefaction. Moreover, at the outset the museum was not a museum of fine art at all. Its collection consisted mostly of miners’ picks, shovels, caps, boots, panning equipment, and other relics of the gold rush. Such pieces of art and bric-a-brac as the de Youngs accumulated were relegated to basement storage rooms. Still, the museum was an immediate success with the public, so much so that Michael de Young eventually was persuaded to donate a new building for it, where, at last, there would be room for the actual display of art.

  The museum continued to be called the de Young Museum, even though it was operated by the City of San Francisco. After de Young’s death the Chronicle began referring to it grandly as the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, even though, as Frances Moffat points out, “it was not a memorial to Michael de Young, but to the Mid-Winter Fair. For years, by editorial order, daily attendance was dutifully reported in the Chronicle.” In that way the story that the museum had been the singlehanded cultural creation and contribution of Michael de Young became official and a matter of public record. And to assure that the record remained unchanged, the de Young family and other “friends of the San Francisco Chronicle” placed a large statue of Michael de Young at the museum’s entrance in Golden Gate Park.

  Needless to say, among those San Franciscans watching the creation of the myth of M. H. de Young, philanthropist and art patron, were Alma and Adolph Spreckels. Mr. and Mrs. Spreckels observed the steady posthumous elevation of de Young’s reputation from common blackmailer to leading citizen with grim amusement and no small amount of resentment, even jealousy. Gradually they began to conceive of a fine arts museum that they themselves would build and present to San Francisco. Naturally, the museum that Adolph Spreckels and his remarkable wife would build would be bigger, grander, finer, and artier than what they considered “that civic hoax,” the despised de Young Museum. As we shall see, it was.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Great Museum War

  For all its interest in art and culture, San Francisco remained for many years somewhat parochi
al 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.