Kenneth Rexroth
Six Columns from the San Francisco Magazine
Return of the Booboisie?
Six Columns from the San Francisco Magazine
When I was a young lad, when H.L. Mencken was at the height of his popularity with the fraternity-to-stockbroker set, us young intellectuals thought he was already out of date. George Babbitt’s flowering time we thought was the Harding-Coolidge administration. Mencken’s booboisie were the species threatened with extinction. I went along, minding my own business. I didn’t bother them; they didn’t bother me. “Live and let live,” said I, “they’re going down the long, long trail with the Red Man, poor things.” Recently I looked around, over my shoulder, and lo, they had bred and turned carnivorous. Were two hundred million of them sniffing at my heels, and threatening to encircle me? But there was a change. Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt was a little, unhappy man. There’s nothing little about the Big Bad Babbitts who’ve grown up around us today.
Something is happening to the American lifestyle in 1973. There’s a quite conscious and deliberate attempt to return it to the famous “American Way of Life” of the twenties. All the wizards and shamans and haruspexes along Madison Avenue have suddenly become fascinated, not by the uprising of Middle American but by the Electoral College vote. They seem to think that the proportion of hips to squares, liberals to reactionaries, in the United States at present is as the proportion of the populations of Massachusetts and Washington, D.C. to the rest of the country.
This of course is not true; there has not been a mass wave of reaction and conventionality sweeping over the American public. McGovern lost the election because he was McGovern and because of the antics of some of his more unbridled supporters, particularly on camera at the convention, and because of the desertion of the hard-core Left who moved obedient to international considerations. Almost any responsible Democratic candidate could have won. I am inclined to think Eugene McCarthy could have won. The significant thing about the McGovern vote is its immense size. That many million people were willing to vote for a left liberal who had revealed himself as anything but stable personally. That’s a lot of people to approve of Willie Brown and Women’s Lib and even accept Gay Lib on camera if it’s in the small hours of the morning. But there is every indication that the commercial opinion makers can see only that little handful of electoral votes. “We have to reorganize our priorities and redefine our targets.”
What is usually considered to be America’s most successful magazine has moved far to the right, now that its lead time since November has caught up with its contents. There are still beavers on the gatefolds, plenty of bawdry in the cartoons and jokes, and illustrated features on porn movies, but the fiction and the think pieces are very clean, and the front matter has become definitely, consciously conservative. The famous interviews are no longer with people like Huey Newton or Jerry Rubin, even the people in show business and sports chosen for a yak session are characters of the Right, or political illiterates. As for the magazine’s competitors, they compete by being pornier and beaverier and most important, positively reactionary, except one, the magazine’s own sister which it has budded off to take care of the audience developed by the better underground press. Correction! As we go to press, the current issue of Playboy is running an interview with Huey Newton himself. Maybe “times they are a-changin’.”
This may sound trivial. Indeed it is not. It is in this area of communications that the major male advertising targets are defined and the synthetic lifestyle of the year is manufactured. Here is determined the image of the man who buys expensive sound systems, octuple, or duodecimal, or whatever they are now, the better whiskeys, the high-powered slinky cars and the nifty threads. Just so the great array of housewives’ magazines defines the image of the other great target, the American family, and here too the shift to conservatism in political, racial and social, but not sexual, matters is readily apparent.
The great exceptions to this shift have been the middle-of-the-road, dignified newspapers like the New York Times and the two leading newsweeklies, which have been specifically attacked by name by the administration as though they had been edited by Leon Trotsky. They’re mad. Their background stories on the moral climate of contemporary Washington and the skullduggery of Watergate, ITT, and assorted scandals sometimes do sound a little like they’d been written by some of the more talented contributors to The Militant. Of course they’re justified by the facts, and the editorial policies of the New York Times, Time, Newsweek and the Washington Post reflect very accurately the week-to-week temper of their readers. They, far more than the smart boys on Madison Avenue and in the old Palmolive Building in Chicago, are experts at continuous polling; their fever charts are accurate.
We seem to be sliding rapidly into a new Harding administration without even anybody like Herbert Hoover to say, “Face the music, and then straighten up and fly right, and preserve your integrity.” Maybe in the most fashionable restaurants and cocktail parties in Washington the conversations sound like everybody has gone crazy for the fast, crooked, and almighty buck, but this is something just taking place at the top, and it isn’t just cream that rise to the top; sometimes it’s scum.
America’s once largest movie company may be taken over by a conglomerate, every serious picture in production junked and all money and effort concentrated on cheap, quick-money, grade B films where B stands for boob as in booboisie, but this is just exploiting a neglected pocket. It doesn’t represent a New Wave either in films or in the population. The highbrow film audience, like the highbrow record audience, goes on increasing geometrically. It’s still there and it isn’t really underground. So too, what’s going to happen as we slide into a Second Harding administration, but more ruthless and more shameless and without good old whiskey-drinking, secretary-bottom-patting, poker-playing Warren Gamaliel Harding to keep up the Gemütlich, and Coolidge and Hoover to speak up for the Ten Commandments? The opposition has not been driven underground.
San Francisco’s Smug Corruption
Now that everyone has written a Watergate column or editorial, I suppose it behooves me to speak my piece, and to speak it in terms of the San Francisco community. Years ago Herb Caen remarked, “San Francisco City Hall is riddled with honesty.” It is true that the kind of bribery, corruption and direct participation of politicians in vice and crime so typical of many American cities does not exist to anywhere near the same degree in San Francisco. The corruption of San Francisco politics is the corruption of ordinary business enterprise, of American human relations generally — business as usual. But that’s precisely what the public has said about Watergate: “That’s the sort of thing all politicians do. Those guys were just so inexperienced, inept and arrogant that they got caught.” That’s probably true. The whole thing was unbelievably amateurish.
In San Francisco we do things differently. Almost never can anyone get near the top of the political structure without being pretty cool, pretty hip. Old-time hustlers had a word for it: “smart.” A much cooler thing than hip. “Keep your nose clean and don’t volunteer.” “Know the answers, but first know the questions.” What this leads to is smugness, not the adolescent cockiness of the White House janissaries.
In recent years, corruption has obviously penetrated San Francisco. All you have to do is walk down the street. The same people control the joints on Broadway — once the most honest, least “clip” entertainment district in the United States — as control Vegas or the French Quarter or once controlled Calumet City. San Francisco’s homosexual prostitution district is almost as big and busy as Bombay’s. There are few places in the world where it is easier to purchase hard drugs. Almost all the whores, male or female, roll their tricks if they get a chance. One thing that’s still pretty tight is gambling. And it’s the tightness of this single racket that indicates as much as anything else the existence of corruption. The gamblers want that money spent in Nevada, where they can wash it quickly and dump it into their enormous cash pool.
Yet most of this change in San Francisco in the past 15 years is due to the presence of those very virtues on which the City prides itself: tolerance, sophistication, imperturbability and unlimited permissiveness. Many years ago I said that San Francisco was the last home of la vie Méditerranée, of laissez faire and dolce far niente — virtues certainly no longer characteristic of the cities on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea itself. Unfortunately the easiest thing to be smug about is broad-mindedness. San Franciscans like to think of their city as a modern Athens, but they don’t care to do much about it. They have an inordinate civic pride, but very little civic responsibility.
Remember those ads with that big insurance company located in a little Wisconsin town, featuring the cultural advantages, community pleasures and fruitful social life of a place about the size of Harvard? There’s another series of ads that feature Des Moines, Iowa, which really is a civilized place, whatever the “natives of California” whose parents came from there may think of Iowa.
There are a lot of little places in the hinterland that try harder. It’s supposed to be unsophisticated to bother. Only hicks worry about where the money went for BART, or if the infrastructure is efficient, the streets properly paved, the sewers working, the Bay being depolluted and whether or not the schools are safe and provide quality education.
This has always been true of San Francisco. As a well-planned efficient community it has never existed. Like New York City, it is civically one of the most backward great cities of the world. Even that immense madhouse called Tokyo is operated with greater responsibility.
All this was fine once. It was possible to agree with Jefferson, that “government which governs least governs best,” or with Lincoln Steffens, that “bad” government is better than “good” government. This is no longer true. The technology of modern urbanism, the demands of the people, and the breakdown of universally accepted public morality have brought all the big cities of the world to the brink of a most severe crisis. Perhaps its very lethargy has saved San Francisco from some of the worst aspects of the urban crisis. We don’t have quite as much vice, quite as many muggings, quite as bad slums as some places, though we do have the highest suicide, VD and alcoholism rates. What we lack is concerned action.
The City has an elite — and how. One of the elitist elites in the world, and do they know it. But they’re not prepared to assume the roles which are the only justification for an elite. The last thing in the world any of them want to be is a guardian of Plato’s republic. Dianne Feinstein is one of the few politicians in two generations to be even remotely connected with the City’s elite. I don’t agree with her all the time, but if everybody on the Board of Supervisors were as civilized as she is, and as much of an activist, San Francisco might take a decided turn for the better.
Leadership in a city’s life is provided by — among other things — an aggressive, concerned press. There is no Washington Post or St. Louis Post-Dispatch or Louisville Courier in San Francisco. Our two newspapers are not just a Siamese-twin monopoly. Unlike Siamese twins, they have worked out a modus vivendi in the most liberal sense of the word: an easy method for keeping one another alive. One has built itself entirely around its city columnist — whom everybody who is anybody has to read with the grapefruit. It’s a very liberal paper. Why? Because it permits its columnist to make off-color jokes and even suggest a four-letter word once a week. The other paper thinks of itself as a kind of Madame Tussaud’s, a historical waxworks museum enshrining a great past when robber barons were robber barons and press lords were press lords. Unfortunately, it’s run by a board of directors around a mahogany table in New York, none of whom know anything about the newspaper business. It is supposed to be reactionary — no dirty words. But when push comes to shove both papers come down on the same side of the fence, a fence with a big sign on it: “Let sleeping dogs lie.” Neither paper has run an exposé of any of the many evils the city is heir to, in over a generation. If you asked the publishers, they’d say there weren’t any such evils. The plain fact of the matter is, neither paper would dream of spending any money like the money spent for weeks and weeks on the Watergate investigation before it began to pay off in hard facts.
Bohemian San Francisco Between the Wars
Having spoken my little piece about the election, I can get back to the short series of columns I hope to do on San Francisco between the wars, and in this one, to North Beach and Telegraph Hill — The Last Bohemia. Now that almost a generation has passed since the first Abstract Expressionists and Morris Graves lived here and the San Francisco Renaissance and the Beats started writing and the Tape Music Center began and San Francisco became for ten years the liveliest culture capital in the world and its artists and writers famous from Asunción to Reykjavik and from Irkutsk to Mexico City and the place every young intellectual wanted to go as soon as possible, it is hard to believe how provincial the City was between the First War and the Depression.
I hadn’t been here very long before I got a visit from the leading artist, who looked around the walls and said, “Waall I see you’re experimentin’ with abstract form like Matissey and Picassio.” Folks were nothing if not loyal to local talent. Everybody, but everybody, believed the greatest living poet was George Sterling, the greatest living novelist Kathleen Norris, and that Papa Hertz was an orchestral conductor and the rubbery sounds emitted by his Symphony were music. My wife and I had to admit it was a change of pace after Paris, New York and Chicago.
There were advantages, as there always are to provincialism and cultural lag. The marketplace was far away. It was quite impossible to make a living as an artist, writer or composer in San Francisco, so the practitioners of the arts were in it for love, and they were mostly very poor indeed. This economic situation produced a Bohemia very like that of New York or Chicago from the 1880s to the First War.
Another important factor was that Prohibition simply didn’t exist. There were several bars on Market Street alone where a perfect stranger could walk in and get a full whiskey glass of respectable moonshine or grappa for 25¢, and it was easy to find red wine for $2 a gallon or less. A studio in the Montgomery Block cost $12. Over on Washington and Sansome were even bigger rooms, gaslit, for $8-10 a month. If you had practically no money at all you could get free buttermilk at the Golden State Dairy nearby and in the produce district as the markets closed all the free vegetables you could carry away, and free fish at the wholesale fish market. There was another place where you could get free dried fruit. There was no problem, if you knew your way around, in maintaining a very healthful diet. None of the cheap hotels in North Beach cost more than a dollar a day. The cheapest Italian restaurants served a full dinner and a glass of red ink for 25¢, and you could put together a Chinese dinner at Yee Jun’s for 25¢ a person — or less.
The hangouts were: the Casa Beguine, a wonderful restaurant then entering its decline — Mama and Papa Beguine were growing old, and their customers were deserting Bohemia for the Establishment; the Telegraph Hill Tavern, run by a great cook and great lover and bad poet, a lady who called herself Myrtokleia, after a character in The Songs of Bilitis; and Izzy Gomez’s, at first on Pacific, across from the firehouse, immortalized in William Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life. The Casa Beguine in its best days was a genuine artists’ and writers’ restaurant where people lingered long after splendid dinners in passionate discussions or intense chess games, and after many glasses of wine ended up singing until after midnight. It must have been something like the Closerie des Lilas in Paris in the 1900s, when the evenings were presided over by Paul Fort, the “Prince of Poets.”
Myrto’s was different. The customers were mostly pure Bohemians — people with artistic personalities but little or no artistic talent, who enjoyed many of the pleasures of the rich while sacrificing many of the necessities of even the poor. The atmosphere was one of muted orgy, liable to break loose at any late hour into gay, bedraggled abandon. Myrto and her friends were always getting busted at the annual arts ball for appearing in the altogether or as they say in French, à poil. Myrto’s was more like the Café Dôme in Montparnasse’s craziest days or the even crazier “bohemian tea rooms” of Greenwich Village or Chicago’s Near North Side — Grace’s Garret, the Purple Pup, the Green Mask, the Gray Cottage, all of them dead long before the Telegraph Hill Tavern was born.
Izzy Gomez’s was something else. Unique. Sui generis. It really was as portrayed in The Time of Your Life, except that it was also a favorite hangout for hardboiled, sophisticated newspapermen of the kind that flourished in the good old days when no self-respecting newspaperman, including even the editorial writers, believed a word of the Social Lie, but knew all the real answers. They gave the place a rowdy, slightly underworld character of half-suppressed brawl. Now they’re all dead. The last to go was handsome Pat O’Niall who died, fat and alcoholic, on the Pittsburgh Press, a legend of awe and wonder to his colleagues in what has come to be called “the profession of journalism.” Izzy’s grappa, the best liquor in town, was 25 cents a shot. He served nothing else but home brew. Bootleg big brewery beer was made only by the Organization and not allowed in San Francisco. For meals Izzy served thick, luscious steaks, French fries and salads — a considerable number of meals and liquor free, not just to starving artists, but to people he liked. I was always a little embarrassed to patronize the place because he would never take any money from me. If I brought guests for dinner I had to give them the money and have them pretend to be hosting me. Even so, Izzy would not usually take the money.
More next month.
More on Bohemian San Francisco
San Francisco’s Bohemia, between the two world wars, may have been provincial, but in those days there was no question whatever that the laissez faire and dolce far niente of la vie méditerranée was stronger and lasted longer here than anywhere on that tideless inland sea itself.
San Tropez wasn’t in it with Telegraph Hill. Most of the hill was still unpaved. There weren’t even real streets on the north side and only rickety wooden staircases on the east. Two different old ladies herded goats in the vacant lots and kept them at night in barns that were part of their own homes. The Italians were almost all from North Italy, the largest contingent from Lucca. To this day the Lucchese have the largest town club in the Bay Area, and whenever I have visited Lucca all sorts of people greet me by name and invite me for a drink.
At harvest time the gutters were purple with overflowing refuse from the vine presses, and an atmosphere of wholesome orgy borne on the strains of mandolins, guitars and accordions enveloped the whole hill. This Latin virtú communicated itself most infectiously to the scattered bohemians, who still constituted a very small minority. San Francisco must have been the only city in the United States where intellectuals drank wine rather than hard liquor or cocktails at their parties.
Even the sex was wholesome, though promiscuous. You seldom felt the frustration, tensions and combativeness so characteristic of Greenwich Village. Most parties or even just nightly get-togethers ended with singing. Six months going about on Telegraph Hill would have provided anyone with an immense repertoire of authentic folk songs, old English ballads and the highest quality of classic bawdy songs. Myrtokleia, and after her day the painter Richard Ayer, father of the young woman poet Hilary Ayer, had absolutely unlimited repertoires and could sing all night. So could a man I believe is still alive down in Big Sur, Harry Dick Ross, who had a bellow like the late movie actor Joe E. Brown — which covered the fact he couldn’t sing a note. All Telegraph Hill needed to be the Land of Cockayne come true were those roast pigeons flying around with a knife and fork sticking in them.
There wasn’t much other music in those days. King Oliver had played San Francisco in the early ’20s and so had “Frisco, the American Apache Dancer,” who was the first man to take a jazz band into Palace Time vaudeville.
But this spirit did not last. Perhaps the reason was that the black community in San Francisco was very small. It stretched from Ellis Street to Sutter and from Webster to Laguna, sparsely sprinkled amongst the predominantly Japanese population. Fillmore Street in those days was mostly Jewish. Still, one after another there were wonderful gathering places of the kind that came to be known as “after-hours joints.” The earliest I can remember was a speakeasy called, I think, Timmes’. It was a house, west of Fillmore a few doors, probably on O’Farrell, and it was like an ideal Harlem rent party that never stopped. Timmes’ served excellent liquor, red wine and very good grappo, which I believe he got from the same supplier as Izzy Gomez.
The place had a piano with a fine collection of ragtime rolls, but there was usually somebody around who could play it in an ultra-funky Jelly Roll Morton style. I don’t know where they came from since there was no market for their talents, but all sorts of musicians with all sorts of instruments would wander in and jam until dawn, while between the little tables the customers would roll and bump. After Timmes’ there was a succession of wonderful places. Elsie’s, Blackshears’, Jack Bryant’s in the tiny black district of seagoing folks at Pacific and Embarcadero. Timmes’ and Elsie’s had the friendliest atmosphere of any entertainment places I’ve ever been in. And Jack Bryant had the most beautiful waitresses I’ve ever seen, girls who’d make the chorus line at the Harlem Apollo Theatre look plain and dowdy.
There was, in those days, no hostility directed toward hip white people whatever. Although there were very few of them at the tables, there were always plenty of white musicians jamming, and welcome.
By the time Blackshears’ came along, a faint note of hostility had begun to appear and by the time of Jimbo’s, the most famous of them all, black hostility toward whites gradually became oppressive. When Wilma opened Soulsville a few years ago, white musicians were quietly frozen off the stand — to her distress. I must say that I never felt any discrimination or hostility whatsoever either in the after-hours joints or in regular clubs like Jack’s or the Club Alabam. The latter was pretty funky but Jack’s was very high-class, and although the black community was small, functioned as a kind of black Hungry i. Jack’s introduced a remarkable list of entertainers, even the great bass singer Kenneth Spencer, who went on from Sutter and Fillmore to fame in Bach, Mozart and Monteverdi in Europe.
Years later I came into a Chinese restaurant near the Sorbonne in Paris. Behind me a powerful bass voice was speaking and my wine glass trembled in front of me. “My God!” I said to my wife, “Kenneth Spencer’s in this room somewhere!” So he was. He was with Alberta Hunter, an old friend of mine from Chicago, the first woman to ever sing blues on the concert stage (though the surviving records don’t sound very bluesy). We spent the night talking about the old days.
They were pretty good old days. There was probably less interracial tension and less prejudice against blacks in San Francisco than anywhere else in the world. Private parties, clubs, after-hours joints and big dances were places of pure joy. Something that I have always thought very significant of interracial naturalness, not just tolerance, is the incidence of white male-black female interracial couples. In those days in a place like Jack’s or Timmes’ there were almost as many as the other way around. Alas, today interracial tensions have grown so severe that natural contacts have almost died out — first in interracial organizations like CORE and at last, and finally, in jazz.
Local versus National Corruption
In the last few months, a good many people have written me asking why I no longer write about national and international events in this column. “Have you sold out?” No. It is a question of the function of the column in relation to the magazine as a whole. San Francisco is now much more locally and community oriented, and so is this column. However, since a lot of readers have complained about my silence during one of the gravest political crises in American history — a period of profound economic disorder, a war that threatened the peace of the world, and a worldwide pandemic of uncontrollable inflation — it is time to discuss all these catastrophes in terms of their meaning for San Francisco.
Our leading newspaper columnist once said, “San Francisco City Hall is riddled with honesty.” Yet whenever he has voiced any sharp criticism of the power structure, something he assiduously avoids on the whole, he has had to back down a couple of days later. There has not been a serious investigation of the hidden political life of the City since the Atherton Investigation, long before the Second World War, and that was not precipitated by the newspapers. San Francisco is an inordinately smug city. The editors of the local papers would deny that there was anything to investigate in our political life. What they mean is that the owners are part of the elaborately interlocking Establishment, and besides, are too tight to spend any money.
What the current contretemps in Washington demonstrates is the total collapse of political morality. The defense says, “Everybody does the same thing; why shouldn’t they, they were just unlucky enough to get caught.” Unfortunately this is all too true. The use of the FBI dossiers for purposes of political intimidation dates back to Franklin Roosevelt, who as every old-time political journalist knows, began it with the exhaustive investigation of Huey Long, and of all people, Paul McNutt. He had a quite irrational fear of both men. (Huey Long’s assassination, incidentally, was the first political assassination to raise a cloud of rumors and paranoid accusations.) Lyndon Johnson’s use of bugs and tapes was both illegal and in the case of Martin Luther King, shameful. So it goes. The only president since Teddy Roosevelt not to be accused of some kind of skullduggery was Eisenhower. He had a very simple recipe for avoiding accusations of crooked activities: avoid activity.
If the top of the political structure and the majority of the electorate on which it is based are as corrupt as they seem to be, what right have we to assume that the bottom, the grassroots, our little local political scene, is cleaner than driven snow and hounds’ teeth? The evidence is all to the contrary. The entertainment industry of San Francisco has been turned into another Calumet City, or Cicero. The red light district swarms with male and female prostitutes, most of them on drugs and most of whom roll their tricks. Yet the Mayor and the Chief of Police say there is no organized crime in San Francisco, and San Francisco policemen never accept payoffs. If evidence you require, look about you. Furthermore, such statements raise serious suspicions of complicity.
But that’s just the beginning. Who is making money and how, out of the Manhattanization of the City? What is the role of banks in this destruction of what was once the most beautiful city in America? What is the relationship of the officers of the major financial institutions to the political structure of the City and to its cultural life? Who, for instance, controls the Art Commission? And who is he? What are the investments of the leading political officers of the City? Who stands to profit from Urban Renewal? It’s been demonstrated many times that the taxpayers always lose on it.
What San Francisco needs is a big dose of Watergate Spirit, a whole bunch of Ervins, Cox’s, Siricas, and at least some of those dedicated political reporters who dug away for months and months. And, of course, newspaper owners and editors willing to back them up. Self-satisfied San Francisco says, looking at the mess in Washington, “It can’t happen here.” Yet a leading foreign political commentator has said, “What we are witnessing in America is the introduction of typical California politics into the national arena.” “Oh!” says the San Franciscan. “He means Southern California. We vote for grass and McGovern.” I’d like to quietly point out that McGovern may have been a clean-living cowboy from the lone prairie, but both his vice-presidential candidates were deliberately chosen because of their connections with two of the most corrupt political machines in America: St. Louis and Chicago.
How are you going to organize a pure and clean government movement when nobody admits its necessity? And when in fact the majority of the citizens are proud of the existing state of affairs. This includes even radicals. My friend Lawrence Ferlinghetti thinks North Beach is just wonderful. He denies the evidence of his sense and lives in a North Beach which, in fact, he has never seen — the days of Izzy Gomez and Casa Beguine, and fifty-cent tables d’hôtes with wine — while the streets swarm with heroin pushers and pimps and the joints stock go-go clip artistes. (Chicago was proud of Al Capone. His lawyer was a member of one of Chicago’s leading firms, a partner of which was the great radical Clarence Darrow, and his banker was Charles Evans Dawes, Vice President of the United States.)
You see, I haven’t really fulfilled my promise. I haven’t said anything about the relation of the San Francisco political scene to international politics, with its recurrent crises. The fact is, it shouldn’t have any. It is absurd that we should judge local politicians by their attitude to Mao, Brezhnev, Sadat or Golda Meir. That was what was wrong with the Movement. All of its leaders had pipelines to their favorite capitals and spoke for Moscow, Havana, Peking or, at the end, when the big powers began to divide up the world, North Korea. It’s all right, personally, to oppose Papadopoulos and support Allende, but it doesn’t have much to do with what goes on in the woodwork — or rather the marble wainscoting — of City Hall.
Organized Vice, Then and Now
Following my last column, people have inquired “How has San Francisco changed? Wasn’t it always a wide-open town? You object to the scene today. What’s the difference?”
Maybe I’m just a petty bourgeois. The difference is between big business and small business, between domesticated “vice” and organized vice verging into high crime. It must be borne in mind that so-called crimes without victims — gambling and prostitution especially — were until recently what we might call civil service occupations in most countries. The only highly organized business at that time in San Francisco was the Chinese lottery. It was at least as common as policy or numbers in the East, and it was played by all kinds of people, of every race. Runners visited stores and offices and even many homes all over the City. Obviously, such an enterprise is big business, but it was tightly regulated both by the police and by the so-called fraternal associations that ruled Chinatown. No hanky-panky was permitted — the control was so tight that nobody was so foolish as to attempt any. Other forms of Chinese gambling were strictly closed to Caucasians, although at night all of middle Grant Avenue resounded with the rattle of mahjong pieces. Similarly, no Oriental-Caucasian interracial prostitution was permitted by the rulers of the Chinese community (following the well-known “Gentlemen’s Agreement”), although limousines with sing-song girls herded by fat, drowsy Mamas came and went in Chinatown all night. Oriental women who came from elsewhere and attempted to work as interracial prostitutes were reputed to vanish. Very few tried. Dolly Fine had a girl whom she could provide for big spenders and leading politicians, named Lala. She was over six feet tall, with a vaguely Oriental caste of features — I think she was Jewish. Her favors could be enjoyed for a minimum of fifty dollars, later a hundred, in the days when an ordinary favor cost two dollars and a half. If the customer objected, Dolly explained that Lala was North Chinese, “They’re very tall you know, and almost as white as we are.” That was it.
Most black people were unskilled working men and domestic servants. Although as the Depression deepened there was a good deal of compensatory prostitution, black and white, on the part of women who simply didn’t have enough money to live on, these girls were strictly controlled by the cop on the beat — who shook them down for whatever he could get, from two bits up, the theory being that “if you clout them you control them.”
Brothels were a different matter. As the Atherton investigation revealed, “The Organization” in San Francisco was the police department itself, ruled by a small group that called themselves the Iron Ring. They permitted, with one exception, no other organization whatever. If you paid off, you could run one brothel, but not two. There were card rooms all over the City, but each was a separate enterprise. Pimps, in the strict sense of the word, were not allowed to exist. A girl could keep an “old man” but she had to keep him out of sight. Any male who tried to hustle the streets for his old lady got short shrift from the police. Although it’s supposed to be completely illegal nowadays, the Municipal Court commonly ordered questionable characters to leave town within twenty-four hours and the police were even more peremptory. A friend of mine from Chicago who had handled some of Capone’s business with that city’s leading law firm visited me unexpectedly one morning and we went over to the Star Dairy Lunch next to the Hall of Justice at noon. A lieutenant of detectives, later Chief of Police, called me over to his table. “Isn’t that so and so?” he said. “Yes.” “Send him over.” My friend came back shaking. “What happened?” “He said ‘Hello Terry? What are you doing in San Francisco?’ ‘Oh, just traveling through on my way to see my sister in Los Angeles.’ ‘Ever been here before?’ ‘No.’ ‘That’s nice. It’s a great place. Get Kenneth to show you around. Chinatown, Golden Gate Park, Seal Rocks. Have dinner at Tait’s at the Beach. If you need a car, we can lend you one. And then, Terry, you get on the Daylight to L.A. tomorrow morning. That’s all, Terry.’ ”
“What in the hell kind of town is this?” my friend asked.
“They run it,” I said.
Yet at the same time San Francisco was a moderate sanctuary. It wasn’t Toledo, Ohio, but still it was a hard place to get expedited from, unless you were hotter than a two-dollar pistol. So, if you kept your nose clean, and didn’t volunteer, the forces of law and order not only ignored you but left a good deal of law and order up to you and your kind. As long as you didn’t try to organize something.
Bookmaking is an activity which naturally proliferates. It’s hard to run just one bookie joint, so the City’s principal bookmaker operated through a chain of cigar stores. He was a very respected citizen, but he got too big for his britches, and they broke him. I had a good friend who was a commission merchant. He liked to think of his business as a cover. He dropped a lot of money at the races, in poker games, and laid a lot of it on very expensive broads. He liked to fancy himself a Big Time Hustler, but he was really just a businessman. One day I was waiting to lunch with him at Tadich’s. In came two characters out of a grade-B gangster picture with their right hands stiff in their coat pockets. They kicked open the wicket and pushed the terrified receptionist out of their way. In about a half hour they came out, and a little after them came my friend, green and quivering like lime Jello. At lunch I got it out of him. “They were from Chicago. They want me to take over the distribution for Capone’s sugar moon business in Northern California.” (Capone had just organized all the big beet sugar moonshine distilleries in Colorado, with a good deal of gun play — a forgotten episode in his career.) “Nothing’s going to happen.” I counseled. “What do you mean, nothing’s going to happen? They’ll dump me if I don’t play ball.” “Don’t worry, you’ll never see them again. They will have them out of town by night.” He never did see them again, but a week or so later their car was found at the foot of the cliff below the narrow road out to Point Reyes Light House. They were both dead, but showed no signs of violence.
Something is happening to the American lifestyle in 1973. There’s a quite conscious and deliberate attempt to return it to the famous “American Way of Life” of the twenties. All the wizards and shamans and haruspexes along Madison Avenue have suddenly become fascinated, not by the uprising of Middle American but by the Electoral College vote. They seem to think that the proportion of hips to squares, liberals to reactionaries, in the United States at present is as the proportion of the populations of Massachusetts and Washington, D.C. to the rest of the country.
This of course is not true; there has not been a mass wave of reaction and conventionality sweeping over the American public. McGovern lost the election because he was McGovern and because of the antics of some of his more unbridled supporters, particularly on camera at the convention, and because of the desertion of the hard-core Left who moved obedient to international considerations. Almost any responsible Democratic candidate could have won. I am inclined to think Eugene McCarthy could have won. The significant thing about the McGovern vote is its immense size. That many million people were willing to vote for a left liberal who had revealed himself as anything but stable personally. That’s a lot of people to approve of Willie Brown and Women’s Lib and even accept Gay Lib on camera if it’s in the small hours of the morning. But there is every indication that the commercial opinion makers can see only that little handful of electoral votes. “We have to reorganize our priorities and redefine our targets.”
What is usually considered to be America’s most successful magazine has moved far to the right, now that its lead time since November has caught up with its contents. There are still beavers on the gatefolds, plenty of bawdry in the cartoons and jokes, and illustrated features on porn movies, but the fiction and the think pieces are very clean, and the front matter has become definitely, consciously conservative. The famous interviews are no longer with people like Huey Newton or Jerry Rubin, even the people in show business and sports chosen for a yak session are characters of the Right, or political illiterates. As for the magazine’s competitors, they compete by being pornier and beaverier and most important, positively reactionary, except one, the magazine’s own sister which it has budded off to take care of the audience developed by the better underground press. Correction! As we go to press, the current issue of Playboy is running an interview with Huey Newton himself. Maybe “times they are a-changin’.”
This may sound trivial. Indeed it is not. It is in this area of communications that the major male advertising targets are defined and the synthetic lifestyle of the year is manufactured. Here is determined the image of the man who buys expensive sound systems, octuple, or duodecimal, or whatever they are now, the better whiskeys, the high-powered slinky cars and the nifty threads. Just so the great array of housewives’ magazines defines the image of the other great target, the American family, and here too the shift to conservatism in political, racial and social, but not sexual, matters is readily apparent.
The great exceptions to this shift have been the middle-of-the-road, dignified newspapers like the New York Times and the two leading newsweeklies, which have been specifically attacked by name by the administration as though they had been edited by Leon Trotsky. They’re mad. Their background stories on the moral climate of contemporary Washington and the skullduggery of Watergate, ITT, and assorted scandals sometimes do sound a little like they’d been written by some of the more talented contributors to The Militant. Of course they’re justified by the facts, and the editorial policies of the New York Times, Time, Newsweek and the Washington Post reflect very accurately the week-to-week temper of their readers. They, far more than the smart boys on Madison Avenue and in the old Palmolive Building in Chicago, are experts at continuous polling; their fever charts are accurate.
We seem to be sliding rapidly into a new Harding administration without even anybody like Herbert Hoover to say, “Face the music, and then straighten up and fly right, and preserve your integrity.” Maybe in the most fashionable restaurants and cocktail parties in Washington the conversations sound like everybody has gone crazy for the fast, crooked, and almighty buck, but this is something just taking place at the top, and it isn’t just cream that rise to the top; sometimes it’s scum.
America’s once largest movie company may be taken over by a conglomerate, every serious picture in production junked and all money and effort concentrated on cheap, quick-money, grade B films where B stands for boob as in booboisie, but this is just exploiting a neglected pocket. It doesn’t represent a New Wave either in films or in the population. The highbrow film audience, like the highbrow record audience, goes on increasing geometrically. It’s still there and it isn’t really underground. So too, what’s going to happen as we slide into a Second Harding administration, but more ruthless and more shameless and without good old whiskey-drinking, secretary-bottom-patting, poker-playing Warren Gamaliel Harding to keep up the Gemütlich, and Coolidge and Hoover to speak up for the Ten Commandments? The opposition has not been driven underground.
[May 1973]
Now that everyone has written a Watergate column or editorial, I suppose it behooves me to speak my piece, and to speak it in terms of the San Francisco community. Years ago Herb Caen remarked, “San Francisco City Hall is riddled with honesty.” It is true that the kind of bribery, corruption and direct participation of politicians in vice and crime so typical of many American cities does not exist to anywhere near the same degree in San Francisco. The corruption of San Francisco politics is the corruption of ordinary business enterprise, of American human relations generally — business as usual. But that’s precisely what the public has said about Watergate: “That’s the sort of thing all politicians do. Those guys were just so inexperienced, inept and arrogant that they got caught.” That’s probably true. The whole thing was unbelievably amateurish.
In San Francisco we do things differently. Almost never can anyone get near the top of the political structure without being pretty cool, pretty hip. Old-time hustlers had a word for it: “smart.” A much cooler thing than hip. “Keep your nose clean and don’t volunteer.” “Know the answers, but first know the questions.” What this leads to is smugness, not the adolescent cockiness of the White House janissaries.
In recent years, corruption has obviously penetrated San Francisco. All you have to do is walk down the street. The same people control the joints on Broadway — once the most honest, least “clip” entertainment district in the United States — as control Vegas or the French Quarter or once controlled Calumet City. San Francisco’s homosexual prostitution district is almost as big and busy as Bombay’s. There are few places in the world where it is easier to purchase hard drugs. Almost all the whores, male or female, roll their tricks if they get a chance. One thing that’s still pretty tight is gambling. And it’s the tightness of this single racket that indicates as much as anything else the existence of corruption. The gamblers want that money spent in Nevada, where they can wash it quickly and dump it into their enormous cash pool.
Yet most of this change in San Francisco in the past 15 years is due to the presence of those very virtues on which the City prides itself: tolerance, sophistication, imperturbability and unlimited permissiveness. Many years ago I said that San Francisco was the last home of la vie Méditerranée, of laissez faire and dolce far niente — virtues certainly no longer characteristic of the cities on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea itself. Unfortunately the easiest thing to be smug about is broad-mindedness. San Franciscans like to think of their city as a modern Athens, but they don’t care to do much about it. They have an inordinate civic pride, but very little civic responsibility.
Remember those ads with that big insurance company located in a little Wisconsin town, featuring the cultural advantages, community pleasures and fruitful social life of a place about the size of Harvard? There’s another series of ads that feature Des Moines, Iowa, which really is a civilized place, whatever the “natives of California” whose parents came from there may think of Iowa.
There are a lot of little places in the hinterland that try harder. It’s supposed to be unsophisticated to bother. Only hicks worry about where the money went for BART, or if the infrastructure is efficient, the streets properly paved, the sewers working, the Bay being depolluted and whether or not the schools are safe and provide quality education.
This has always been true of San Francisco. As a well-planned efficient community it has never existed. Like New York City, it is civically one of the most backward great cities of the world. Even that immense madhouse called Tokyo is operated with greater responsibility.
All this was fine once. It was possible to agree with Jefferson, that “government which governs least governs best,” or with Lincoln Steffens, that “bad” government is better than “good” government. This is no longer true. The technology of modern urbanism, the demands of the people, and the breakdown of universally accepted public morality have brought all the big cities of the world to the brink of a most severe crisis. Perhaps its very lethargy has saved San Francisco from some of the worst aspects of the urban crisis. We don’t have quite as much vice, quite as many muggings, quite as bad slums as some places, though we do have the highest suicide, VD and alcoholism rates. What we lack is concerned action.
The City has an elite — and how. One of the elitist elites in the world, and do they know it. But they’re not prepared to assume the roles which are the only justification for an elite. The last thing in the world any of them want to be is a guardian of Plato’s republic. Dianne Feinstein is one of the few politicians in two generations to be even remotely connected with the City’s elite. I don’t agree with her all the time, but if everybody on the Board of Supervisors were as civilized as she is, and as much of an activist, San Francisco might take a decided turn for the better.
Leadership in a city’s life is provided by — among other things — an aggressive, concerned press. There is no Washington Post or St. Louis Post-Dispatch or Louisville Courier in San Francisco. Our two newspapers are not just a Siamese-twin monopoly. Unlike Siamese twins, they have worked out a modus vivendi in the most liberal sense of the word: an easy method for keeping one another alive. One has built itself entirely around its city columnist — whom everybody who is anybody has to read with the grapefruit. It’s a very liberal paper. Why? Because it permits its columnist to make off-color jokes and even suggest a four-letter word once a week. The other paper thinks of itself as a kind of Madame Tussaud’s, a historical waxworks museum enshrining a great past when robber barons were robber barons and press lords were press lords. Unfortunately, it’s run by a board of directors around a mahogany table in New York, none of whom know anything about the newspaper business. It is supposed to be reactionary — no dirty words. But when push comes to shove both papers come down on the same side of the fence, a fence with a big sign on it: “Let sleeping dogs lie.” Neither paper has run an exposé of any of the many evils the city is heir to, in over a generation. If you asked the publishers, they’d say there weren’t any such evils. The plain fact of the matter is, neither paper would dream of spending any money like the money spent for weeks and weeks on the Watergate investigation before it began to pay off in hard facts.
[August 1973]
Having spoken my little piece about the election, I can get back to the short series of columns I hope to do on San Francisco between the wars, and in this one, to North Beach and Telegraph Hill — The Last Bohemia. Now that almost a generation has passed since the first Abstract Expressionists and Morris Graves lived here and the San Francisco Renaissance and the Beats started writing and the Tape Music Center began and San Francisco became for ten years the liveliest culture capital in the world and its artists and writers famous from Asunción to Reykjavik and from Irkutsk to Mexico City and the place every young intellectual wanted to go as soon as possible, it is hard to believe how provincial the City was between the First War and the Depression.
I hadn’t been here very long before I got a visit from the leading artist, who looked around the walls and said, “Waall I see you’re experimentin’ with abstract form like Matissey and Picassio.” Folks were nothing if not loyal to local talent. Everybody, but everybody, believed the greatest living poet was George Sterling, the greatest living novelist Kathleen Norris, and that Papa Hertz was an orchestral conductor and the rubbery sounds emitted by his Symphony were music. My wife and I had to admit it was a change of pace after Paris, New York and Chicago.
There were advantages, as there always are to provincialism and cultural lag. The marketplace was far away. It was quite impossible to make a living as an artist, writer or composer in San Francisco, so the practitioners of the arts were in it for love, and they were mostly very poor indeed. This economic situation produced a Bohemia very like that of New York or Chicago from the 1880s to the First War.
Another important factor was that Prohibition simply didn’t exist. There were several bars on Market Street alone where a perfect stranger could walk in and get a full whiskey glass of respectable moonshine or grappa for 25¢, and it was easy to find red wine for $2 a gallon or less. A studio in the Montgomery Block cost $12. Over on Washington and Sansome were even bigger rooms, gaslit, for $8-10 a month. If you had practically no money at all you could get free buttermilk at the Golden State Dairy nearby and in the produce district as the markets closed all the free vegetables you could carry away, and free fish at the wholesale fish market. There was another place where you could get free dried fruit. There was no problem, if you knew your way around, in maintaining a very healthful diet. None of the cheap hotels in North Beach cost more than a dollar a day. The cheapest Italian restaurants served a full dinner and a glass of red ink for 25¢, and you could put together a Chinese dinner at Yee Jun’s for 25¢ a person — or less.
The hangouts were: the Casa Beguine, a wonderful restaurant then entering its decline — Mama and Papa Beguine were growing old, and their customers were deserting Bohemia for the Establishment; the Telegraph Hill Tavern, run by a great cook and great lover and bad poet, a lady who called herself Myrtokleia, after a character in The Songs of Bilitis; and Izzy Gomez’s, at first on Pacific, across from the firehouse, immortalized in William Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life. The Casa Beguine in its best days was a genuine artists’ and writers’ restaurant where people lingered long after splendid dinners in passionate discussions or intense chess games, and after many glasses of wine ended up singing until after midnight. It must have been something like the Closerie des Lilas in Paris in the 1900s, when the evenings were presided over by Paul Fort, the “Prince of Poets.”
Myrto’s was different. The customers were mostly pure Bohemians — people with artistic personalities but little or no artistic talent, who enjoyed many of the pleasures of the rich while sacrificing many of the necessities of even the poor. The atmosphere was one of muted orgy, liable to break loose at any late hour into gay, bedraggled abandon. Myrto and her friends were always getting busted at the annual arts ball for appearing in the altogether or as they say in French, à poil. Myrto’s was more like the Café Dôme in Montparnasse’s craziest days or the even crazier “bohemian tea rooms” of Greenwich Village or Chicago’s Near North Side — Grace’s Garret, the Purple Pup, the Green Mask, the Gray Cottage, all of them dead long before the Telegraph Hill Tavern was born.
Izzy Gomez’s was something else. Unique. Sui generis. It really was as portrayed in The Time of Your Life, except that it was also a favorite hangout for hardboiled, sophisticated newspapermen of the kind that flourished in the good old days when no self-respecting newspaperman, including even the editorial writers, believed a word of the Social Lie, but knew all the real answers. They gave the place a rowdy, slightly underworld character of half-suppressed brawl. Now they’re all dead. The last to go was handsome Pat O’Niall who died, fat and alcoholic, on the Pittsburgh Press, a legend of awe and wonder to his colleagues in what has come to be called “the profession of journalism.” Izzy’s grappa, the best liquor in town, was 25 cents a shot. He served nothing else but home brew. Bootleg big brewery beer was made only by the Organization and not allowed in San Francisco. For meals Izzy served thick, luscious steaks, French fries and salads — a considerable number of meals and liquor free, not just to starving artists, but to people he liked. I was always a little embarrassed to patronize the place because he would never take any money from me. If I brought guests for dinner I had to give them the money and have them pretend to be hosting me. Even so, Izzy would not usually take the money.
More next month.
[November 1973]
San Francisco’s Bohemia, between the two world wars, may have been provincial, but in those days there was no question whatever that the laissez faire and dolce far niente of la vie méditerranée was stronger and lasted longer here than anywhere on that tideless inland sea itself.
San Tropez wasn’t in it with Telegraph Hill. Most of the hill was still unpaved. There weren’t even real streets on the north side and only rickety wooden staircases on the east. Two different old ladies herded goats in the vacant lots and kept them at night in barns that were part of their own homes. The Italians were almost all from North Italy, the largest contingent from Lucca. To this day the Lucchese have the largest town club in the Bay Area, and whenever I have visited Lucca all sorts of people greet me by name and invite me for a drink.
At harvest time the gutters were purple with overflowing refuse from the vine presses, and an atmosphere of wholesome orgy borne on the strains of mandolins, guitars and accordions enveloped the whole hill. This Latin virtú communicated itself most infectiously to the scattered bohemians, who still constituted a very small minority. San Francisco must have been the only city in the United States where intellectuals drank wine rather than hard liquor or cocktails at their parties.
Even the sex was wholesome, though promiscuous. You seldom felt the frustration, tensions and combativeness so characteristic of Greenwich Village. Most parties or even just nightly get-togethers ended with singing. Six months going about on Telegraph Hill would have provided anyone with an immense repertoire of authentic folk songs, old English ballads and the highest quality of classic bawdy songs. Myrtokleia, and after her day the painter Richard Ayer, father of the young woman poet Hilary Ayer, had absolutely unlimited repertoires and could sing all night. So could a man I believe is still alive down in Big Sur, Harry Dick Ross, who had a bellow like the late movie actor Joe E. Brown — which covered the fact he couldn’t sing a note. All Telegraph Hill needed to be the Land of Cockayne come true were those roast pigeons flying around with a knife and fork sticking in them.
There wasn’t much other music in those days. King Oliver had played San Francisco in the early ’20s and so had “Frisco, the American Apache Dancer,” who was the first man to take a jazz band into Palace Time vaudeville.
But this spirit did not last. Perhaps the reason was that the black community in San Francisco was very small. It stretched from Ellis Street to Sutter and from Webster to Laguna, sparsely sprinkled amongst the predominantly Japanese population. Fillmore Street in those days was mostly Jewish. Still, one after another there were wonderful gathering places of the kind that came to be known as “after-hours joints.” The earliest I can remember was a speakeasy called, I think, Timmes’. It was a house, west of Fillmore a few doors, probably on O’Farrell, and it was like an ideal Harlem rent party that never stopped. Timmes’ served excellent liquor, red wine and very good grappo, which I believe he got from the same supplier as Izzy Gomez.
The place had a piano with a fine collection of ragtime rolls, but there was usually somebody around who could play it in an ultra-funky Jelly Roll Morton style. I don’t know where they came from since there was no market for their talents, but all sorts of musicians with all sorts of instruments would wander in and jam until dawn, while between the little tables the customers would roll and bump. After Timmes’ there was a succession of wonderful places. Elsie’s, Blackshears’, Jack Bryant’s in the tiny black district of seagoing folks at Pacific and Embarcadero. Timmes’ and Elsie’s had the friendliest atmosphere of any entertainment places I’ve ever been in. And Jack Bryant had the most beautiful waitresses I’ve ever seen, girls who’d make the chorus line at the Harlem Apollo Theatre look plain and dowdy.
There was, in those days, no hostility directed toward hip white people whatever. Although there were very few of them at the tables, there were always plenty of white musicians jamming, and welcome.
By the time Blackshears’ came along, a faint note of hostility had begun to appear and by the time of Jimbo’s, the most famous of them all, black hostility toward whites gradually became oppressive. When Wilma opened Soulsville a few years ago, white musicians were quietly frozen off the stand — to her distress. I must say that I never felt any discrimination or hostility whatsoever either in the after-hours joints or in regular clubs like Jack’s or the Club Alabam. The latter was pretty funky but Jack’s was very high-class, and although the black community was small, functioned as a kind of black Hungry i. Jack’s introduced a remarkable list of entertainers, even the great bass singer Kenneth Spencer, who went on from Sutter and Fillmore to fame in Bach, Mozart and Monteverdi in Europe.
Years later I came into a Chinese restaurant near the Sorbonne in Paris. Behind me a powerful bass voice was speaking and my wine glass trembled in front of me. “My God!” I said to my wife, “Kenneth Spencer’s in this room somewhere!” So he was. He was with Alberta Hunter, an old friend of mine from Chicago, the first woman to ever sing blues on the concert stage (though the surviving records don’t sound very bluesy). We spent the night talking about the old days.
They were pretty good old days. There was probably less interracial tension and less prejudice against blacks in San Francisco than anywhere else in the world. Private parties, clubs, after-hours joints and big dances were places of pure joy. Something that I have always thought very significant of interracial naturalness, not just tolerance, is the incidence of white male-black female interracial couples. In those days in a place like Jack’s or Timmes’ there were almost as many as the other way around. Alas, today interracial tensions have grown so severe that natural contacts have almost died out — first in interracial organizations like CORE and at last, and finally, in jazz.
[December 1973]
In the last few months, a good many people have written me asking why I no longer write about national and international events in this column. “Have you sold out?” No. It is a question of the function of the column in relation to the magazine as a whole. San Francisco is now much more locally and community oriented, and so is this column. However, since a lot of readers have complained about my silence during one of the gravest political crises in American history — a period of profound economic disorder, a war that threatened the peace of the world, and a worldwide pandemic of uncontrollable inflation — it is time to discuss all these catastrophes in terms of their meaning for San Francisco.
Our leading newspaper columnist once said, “San Francisco City Hall is riddled with honesty.” Yet whenever he has voiced any sharp criticism of the power structure, something he assiduously avoids on the whole, he has had to back down a couple of days later. There has not been a serious investigation of the hidden political life of the City since the Atherton Investigation, long before the Second World War, and that was not precipitated by the newspapers. San Francisco is an inordinately smug city. The editors of the local papers would deny that there was anything to investigate in our political life. What they mean is that the owners are part of the elaborately interlocking Establishment, and besides, are too tight to spend any money.
What the current contretemps in Washington demonstrates is the total collapse of political morality. The defense says, “Everybody does the same thing; why shouldn’t they, they were just unlucky enough to get caught.” Unfortunately this is all too true. The use of the FBI dossiers for purposes of political intimidation dates back to Franklin Roosevelt, who as every old-time political journalist knows, began it with the exhaustive investigation of Huey Long, and of all people, Paul McNutt. He had a quite irrational fear of both men. (Huey Long’s assassination, incidentally, was the first political assassination to raise a cloud of rumors and paranoid accusations.) Lyndon Johnson’s use of bugs and tapes was both illegal and in the case of Martin Luther King, shameful. So it goes. The only president since Teddy Roosevelt not to be accused of some kind of skullduggery was Eisenhower. He had a very simple recipe for avoiding accusations of crooked activities: avoid activity.
If the top of the political structure and the majority of the electorate on which it is based are as corrupt as they seem to be, what right have we to assume that the bottom, the grassroots, our little local political scene, is cleaner than driven snow and hounds’ teeth? The evidence is all to the contrary. The entertainment industry of San Francisco has been turned into another Calumet City, or Cicero. The red light district swarms with male and female prostitutes, most of them on drugs and most of whom roll their tricks. Yet the Mayor and the Chief of Police say there is no organized crime in San Francisco, and San Francisco policemen never accept payoffs. If evidence you require, look about you. Furthermore, such statements raise serious suspicions of complicity.
But that’s just the beginning. Who is making money and how, out of the Manhattanization of the City? What is the role of banks in this destruction of what was once the most beautiful city in America? What is the relationship of the officers of the major financial institutions to the political structure of the City and to its cultural life? Who, for instance, controls the Art Commission? And who is he? What are the investments of the leading political officers of the City? Who stands to profit from Urban Renewal? It’s been demonstrated many times that the taxpayers always lose on it.
What San Francisco needs is a big dose of Watergate Spirit, a whole bunch of Ervins, Cox’s, Siricas, and at least some of those dedicated political reporters who dug away for months and months. And, of course, newspaper owners and editors willing to back them up. Self-satisfied San Francisco says, looking at the mess in Washington, “It can’t happen here.” Yet a leading foreign political commentator has said, “What we are witnessing in America is the introduction of typical California politics into the national arena.” “Oh!” says the San Franciscan. “He means Southern California. We vote for grass and McGovern.” I’d like to quietly point out that McGovern may have been a clean-living cowboy from the lone prairie, but both his vice-presidential candidates were deliberately chosen because of their connections with two of the most corrupt political machines in America: St. Louis and Chicago.
How are you going to organize a pure and clean government movement when nobody admits its necessity? And when in fact the majority of the citizens are proud of the existing state of affairs. This includes even radicals. My friend Lawrence Ferlinghetti thinks North Beach is just wonderful. He denies the evidence of his sense and lives in a North Beach which, in fact, he has never seen — the days of Izzy Gomez and Casa Beguine, and fifty-cent tables d’hôtes with wine — while the streets swarm with heroin pushers and pimps and the joints stock go-go clip artistes. (Chicago was proud of Al Capone. His lawyer was a member of one of Chicago’s leading firms, a partner of which was the great radical Clarence Darrow, and his banker was Charles Evans Dawes, Vice President of the United States.)
You see, I haven’t really fulfilled my promise. I haven’t said anything about the relation of the San Francisco political scene to international politics, with its recurrent crises. The fact is, it shouldn’t have any. It is absurd that we should judge local politicians by their attitude to Mao, Brezhnev, Sadat or Golda Meir. That was what was wrong with the Movement. All of its leaders had pipelines to their favorite capitals and spoke for Moscow, Havana, Peking or, at the end, when the big powers began to divide up the world, North Korea. It’s all right, personally, to oppose Papadopoulos and support Allende, but it doesn’t have much to do with what goes on in the woodwork — or rather the marble wainscoting — of City Hall.
[January 1974]
Following my last column, people have inquired “How has San Francisco changed? Wasn’t it always a wide-open town? You object to the scene today. What’s the difference?”
Maybe I’m just a petty bourgeois. The difference is between big business and small business, between domesticated “vice” and organized vice verging into high crime. It must be borne in mind that so-called crimes without victims — gambling and prostitution especially — were until recently what we might call civil service occupations in most countries. The only highly organized business at that time in San Francisco was the Chinese lottery. It was at least as common as policy or numbers in the East, and it was played by all kinds of people, of every race. Runners visited stores and offices and even many homes all over the City. Obviously, such an enterprise is big business, but it was tightly regulated both by the police and by the so-called fraternal associations that ruled Chinatown. No hanky-panky was permitted — the control was so tight that nobody was so foolish as to attempt any. Other forms of Chinese gambling were strictly closed to Caucasians, although at night all of middle Grant Avenue resounded with the rattle of mahjong pieces. Similarly, no Oriental-Caucasian interracial prostitution was permitted by the rulers of the Chinese community (following the well-known “Gentlemen’s Agreement”), although limousines with sing-song girls herded by fat, drowsy Mamas came and went in Chinatown all night. Oriental women who came from elsewhere and attempted to work as interracial prostitutes were reputed to vanish. Very few tried. Dolly Fine had a girl whom she could provide for big spenders and leading politicians, named Lala. She was over six feet tall, with a vaguely Oriental caste of features — I think she was Jewish. Her favors could be enjoyed for a minimum of fifty dollars, later a hundred, in the days when an ordinary favor cost two dollars and a half. If the customer objected, Dolly explained that Lala was North Chinese, “They’re very tall you know, and almost as white as we are.” That was it.
Most black people were unskilled working men and domestic servants. Although as the Depression deepened there was a good deal of compensatory prostitution, black and white, on the part of women who simply didn’t have enough money to live on, these girls were strictly controlled by the cop on the beat — who shook them down for whatever he could get, from two bits up, the theory being that “if you clout them you control them.”
Brothels were a different matter. As the Atherton investigation revealed, “The Organization” in San Francisco was the police department itself, ruled by a small group that called themselves the Iron Ring. They permitted, with one exception, no other organization whatever. If you paid off, you could run one brothel, but not two. There were card rooms all over the City, but each was a separate enterprise. Pimps, in the strict sense of the word, were not allowed to exist. A girl could keep an “old man” but she had to keep him out of sight. Any male who tried to hustle the streets for his old lady got short shrift from the police. Although it’s supposed to be completely illegal nowadays, the Municipal Court commonly ordered questionable characters to leave town within twenty-four hours and the police were even more peremptory. A friend of mine from Chicago who had handled some of Capone’s business with that city’s leading law firm visited me unexpectedly one morning and we went over to the Star Dairy Lunch next to the Hall of Justice at noon. A lieutenant of detectives, later Chief of Police, called me over to his table. “Isn’t that so and so?” he said. “Yes.” “Send him over.” My friend came back shaking. “What happened?” “He said ‘Hello Terry? What are you doing in San Francisco?’ ‘Oh, just traveling through on my way to see my sister in Los Angeles.’ ‘Ever been here before?’ ‘No.’ ‘That’s nice. It’s a great place. Get Kenneth to show you around. Chinatown, Golden Gate Park, Seal Rocks. Have dinner at Tait’s at the Beach. If you need a car, we can lend you one. And then, Terry, you get on the Daylight to L.A. tomorrow morning. That’s all, Terry.’ ”
“What in the hell kind of town is this?” my friend asked.
“They run it,” I said.
Yet at the same time San Francisco was a moderate sanctuary. It wasn’t Toledo, Ohio, but still it was a hard place to get expedited from, unless you were hotter than a two-dollar pistol. So, if you kept your nose clean, and didn’t volunteer, the forces of law and order not only ignored you but left a good deal of law and order up to you and your kind. As long as you didn’t try to organize something.
Bookmaking is an activity which naturally proliferates. It’s hard to run just one bookie joint, so the City’s principal bookmaker operated through a chain of cigar stores. He was a very respected citizen, but he got too big for his britches, and they broke him. I had a good friend who was a commission merchant. He liked to think of his business as a cover. He dropped a lot of money at the races, in poker games, and laid a lot of it on very expensive broads. He liked to fancy himself a Big Time Hustler, but he was really just a businessman. One day I was waiting to lunch with him at Tadich’s. In came two characters out of a grade-B gangster picture with their right hands stiff in their coat pockets. They kicked open the wicket and pushed the terrified receptionist out of their way. In about a half hour they came out, and a little after them came my friend, green and quivering like lime Jello. At lunch I got it out of him. “They were from Chicago. They want me to take over the distribution for Capone’s sugar moon business in Northern California.” (Capone had just organized all the big beet sugar moonshine distilleries in Colorado, with a good deal of gun play — a forgotten episode in his career.) “Nothing’s going to happen.” I counseled. “What do you mean, nothing’s going to happen? They’ll dump me if I don’t play ball.” “Don’t worry, you’ll never see them again. They will have them out of town by night.” He never did see them again, but a week or so later their car was found at the foot of the cliff below the narrow road out to Point Reyes Light House. They were both dead, but showed no signs of violence.
[February 1974]
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